Arguably the biggest bust of the year for me and likely numerous others as well. This day loomed roughly a week beforehand, with the usual bullish shear and instability values being spat out by the GFS and to a lesser degree, the ECMWF. It had all the classic calling cards of an old-school Plains tornado outbreak. However the day of ended up being quite different, with red flags put forth by the NAM and mid-range ensembles essentially ruining the day. Chased a supercell from Elmer, OK to roughly Snyder before letting it go. The second storm we approached as it was crossing the Red River had a terribly flat, laminar base with precipitation spread through it. All in all, not the day I had been hoping for.
We left Norman around 1 PM CDT and initially moved for Lawton. The SPC threw out the now infamous PDS tornado watch as we were eating and shortly after we began to make our way down towards the Red River. By the time we reached Snyder, the first attempt at convective initiation was underway south of Crowell, TX. We moved west out of Manitou on OK5C and ended up sitting a few miles north of Elmer as the storm began to organize itself. We had a beautiful view over some open wheat fields to the south as the storm split, with the left split's base visible off to the southwest.
Shortly after we cut back east towards Tipton to stay ahead of any potential hail. After dipping south on OK5 out of Tipton, we stopped for a bit with some other friends to watch the storm take on a nice bell-shaped appearance. This storm also exhibited the first instance I can think of with gravity waves rippling through the anvil as the updraft grew.
About five minutes after the last picture, the storm finally managed to organize a wall cloud under a pretty hazy base. Only one attempt at a funnel ever seemed to get close as the storm rapidly became more and more HP due to seeding issues from the initial left split that had stuck around on its western flank.
We then took a somewhat ill-advised trip up dirt roads that paralleled US 183 to get a better view of the wall cloud. Thankfully we managed to make it back to OK5C west of Manitou to get a view of the now very HP storm where a lot of chasers had congregated. Our final view before leaving the storm to peek at a separate storm just across the Red River was a somewhat dramatic view of the RFD cut giving off a greenish-blue tint with the rear-flank gust front passing directly overhead.
The last storm of the day we saw ended up being a linear base with widespread precip falling through the middle of it. We were never able to catch back up with the initial storm but did get a decent lightning show on the way home.
Chase Stats
Miles Driven: 341
Cost: $20
Tornadoes: 0
Hail: None
Winds: ~20 mph
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