April 18, 2015 Chase Log

Summary

A promising dryline setup turns out to be an LP dud in far western Oklahoma. An extremely compact shortwave slowly dug into the southern Great Plains with a modest moisture fetch from the Gulf of Mexico in advance of a sharp dryline situated at the state line between Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle.

An enhanced risk was in place across from the Rio Grande up through far western Oklahoma and into northwest Kansas near Great Bend. While tornado chances appeared low, the possibility for scultped supercells was too good to pass up. We initially set a target of Mangum.

After departing down 40 west, we decided to adjust and stuck north of Mangum near Willow and watched the first attempts at convective initiation going up along the dryline near Erick. We slowly moved north as the towers began to anvil out.

Unfortunately, the moisture in the immediate vicinity of the dryline had begun to crater and LCLs began to skyrocket. We had two distinct updrafts with bases well above 1500m by the time we got our first view south of Sayre.

The strong ventilating winds at the anvil level coupled with the persistent moisture depth issues made the storms LP from the getgo. Almost no precip fell at any point at our vantage point even as we moved just to the north of the updraft. Eventually, both bases began to shrivel up and die leaving a substantial orphan anvil in it's wake.

Shortly thereafter, we decided to move back east on Oklahoma 152 to meet a cluster of storms coming out of the Wichitas. Unfortunately, the storms were extraordinarily outflow dominant and presented a meager shelf cloud with cold air streaming out east of Cordell.

Shortly thereafter, we decided to call the chase and began traipsing back east with the storms hot on our heels as we negotiated OK-152 to OK-37 back towards Norman.

Chase Stats
Miles Driven: 299
Cost: $15
Tornadoes: 0
Largest Hail: none
Highest Winds: 30 mph (estimated)

First Tornado of the Season

Finally got on the board this previous Friday (April 29th) after a month and a half of chasing progressively better setups from March onward. An HP supercell that formed in Comanche County produced a brief multi-vortex tornado that we were able to view from just east of Cement as it traipsed northeast and wrapped up. I also saw some of the most intense inflow just off the deck that I've seen in years. Moisture was visibly streaming in from miles outside of the updraft.

While the tornado was brief and I didn't manage to get any salvageable pictures of it (It was twilight lighting at 4 PM CDT), it was nice to get the monkey off my back and enjoy a quick chase within an hour of Norman.

Looking ahead, the pattern begins to take a nosedive. 2016 so far has been notable for it's seeming lack of tornado/supercell productions on the Great Plains. Outside of the Eads, Colorado tornado and the Eva, Oklahoma tornadoes on April 15th, this year has been a pretty big letdown. The Plains look to go between systems in the next week and come under the influence of a cutoff low sitting in the center of a pretty persistent omega block. Funnily enough, after an open Gulf of Mexico the past week with rich moisture streaming all the way to Nebraska, we look to struggle to regain a foothold with respect to moisture content on the prairie. It's been a strange year and it looks like we might be waiting until the end of May into June to really get going.

A Slow Start to the Season

Sorry for the lack of updates for the past few months, things in the academic realm have been keeping me limited in the amount of time I can put into finishing last year's chase logs and updating about the chase season.

So far, 2016 has left me incredibly underwhelmed, even with a decent chase on April 11th in north Texas that yielded a tornado-warned supercell that never quite could latch onto an OFB and become surface based. I wasn't able to trek out to the Panhandles on April 15th due to work and missed out on the tornadoes in the Oklahoma Panhandle as a result. While the season has definitely been slow to get off the ground, this weekend looks like it might finally kick the season into gear. Considerable discrepancies between the ECM and GEFS exist with trough placement, moisture and just about everything other synoptic feature but it seems likely that Sunday through next Tuesday will at least have one chaseable day mixed in. With any luck, some tornadic potential will come out of this next system and get us ready as we tumble towards May.

April 8, 2015 Chase Log

Summary

Unseasonably good shear led to this being hailed as the first possible outbreak on the Great Plains across the traditionally great western Oklahoma/SW Kansas area, an area that had been plagued by a drought leading to chase days being few and far between since 2010 out that way. A sharp dryline was progged to set up somewhere in the far eastern Texas Panhandle/far western Oklahoma region. Unfortunately for this setup, the first hints of what was to come with morning precip on each setup during the traditional chase season reared it's head. Persistent cloud cover and rain were present over much of west-central Oklahoma. This would end up pushing the target area further west than originally thought and many chasers including myself scrambled west towards the stalled dryline when the first signs of convection showed up in the eastern Texas counties up through Roger Mills and Ellis county, Oklahoma. We would end up making a fatal error and dropped southwest out of Alva towards an isolated tornadic supercell moving near Camargo. Shortly after passing through Waynoka, a northern cell moving towards Medicine Lodge, KS got it's act together and spat out the only good tornado of the day.

The buildup to this day saw the most chaser chatter about a setup in a long time. While the target area was nebulous, the general consensus was that the first true potent dryline setup of the year was upon us. A lead impulse looked to set off the dryline right around magic hour (4-5PM). The morning of, we set an initial target of Enid, Oklahoma. This would end up being a somewhat costly mistake in the long run. By the time we reached Enid around 18Z, the dryline hadn't budged from the eastern Panhandle and it was apparent towers were beginning to show up on the northern end closer to the surface low. We stayed on a nice, empty dirt road and tossed a baseball around for about thirty minutes before the towers really got going and we packed it in to begin moving further west.

We turned north to get on US 64 east of Jet and gradually snaked our way through Cherokee and headed for Alva. We were faced with a then still developing, LP storm in western Roger Mills county near Black Kettle National Grassland or the cluster of storms near Selman rocketing north towards the warm front. By the time we made it to Alva, it was decision time. Unfortunately, the mushy appearance of the storms to our north and the crapshoot of beating it to Medicine Lodge had already somewhat made up our minds. But as we entered Alva, the isolated southern storm presented a classic tornadic appearance and became tornado warned west of Camargo. We blazed south on US 281 and made it to Waynoka before we realized our mistake.

While the southern storm still looked decent on radar, the northern storms had finally congealed into a mammoth supercell that was putting on quite a show. We trudged forward and made it through Seiling just our southern storm began to parallel the Canadian. We got in position southeast of Seiling on US 270 and watched the storm move in front of us near a wind farm. At first, it appeared to still be a healthy supercell.

It briefly produced a lazily rotating lowering just to the right of the road but as it continued to move east, it became apparent that something was going extraordinarily wrong with the environment it was moving into.

The base became extremely disorganized and raised significantly. Cold air was pouring into the storm's inflow region and it slowly began to shrivel up just east of Seiling. Roughly 25 minutes after we arrived, the storm almost completely lost it's radar signature with only light rain showing up in a previously 45-50 dBZ core. This was the final picture I snapped before going into a fit of angry laughing.

Inattention to detail was what did us in. We had failed to check the Mesonet or any other surface data to the east where crapvection and precip had been training for most of the late morning. It wasn't until perusing Stormtrack that I saw the Mesonet temperature map that showed ice cold temperatures and general subsidence from the leftovers of the morning convection. The storm had ingested extraordinarily stable air just as it reached Seiling and shriveled up accordingly. Meanwhile, the Medicine Lodge storm had produced one low-contrast, yet pretty tornado and put on a hell of a structure show.

The day had not gone as advertised at all but would be a primer for the difficult forecasting that would come with the frequent bouts of morning precip due to the unusually wet EML source region the southern Plains was drawing from. It would also represent what would turn into an April filled with futility as I whiffed on two setups roughly a week or so later.


Chase Stats 
Miles Driven: 377
Cost: $25
Tornadoes: 0
Largest Hail: None
Highest Winds: None

March 25, 2015 Chase Log

Summary

A solid chase day with a beautifully structured supercell unexpectedly forming just ahead of a crashing cold front north of Anadarko, Oklahoma. A weak, positively-tilted shortwave rapidly moved through the central Plains with a strong westerly component at 500 mb. Dewpoints from 58-61F overspread much of central and southwestern Oklahoma ahead of the sweeping cold front approaching from the due north. Multiple other supercells would occur this day along the front, including the Sand Springs tornado and a weak spinup out of another HP supercell in Moore. The Anadarko supercell would end up being the be the most classic of the storms that day, with most chasers ending up in a logjam at the junction of US-62 and US-81.  

This would promise to be the first major chase day on the Plains for 2015. The Storm Prediction Center slapped a moderate risk across northeastern Oklahoma into southwest Missouri, with a broad 5% tornado swath along the I-44 corridor through Lawton. A brisk cold front was progged to rapidly move through northern and central Oklahoma by later that evening with forcing being exceptionally strong along the southward sag of the front just west of the OKC metro, hinting at the possibility of a linear mode from the getgo.

A lead impulse ahead of the main trough swung through central Oklahoma around 19Z, exacerbating worries about a premature initiation and persistent cloud cover across the area. It shot off a few small cells and led to some strange mammatus under a stratus deck in Norman before firing off the strongest supercell of the day northeast of OKC that would eventually follow I-44 into Sand Springs and produce an EF3 stovepipe.

My chase partner and I left Norman shortly after the lead impulse swung through around 19:45Z with an initial target of Minco, OK. We cut through Chickhasha and swung just north of Pocasset to watch the struggling Cu field off to our northwest. After sitting for half an hour, the first signs of life stirred in the Cu field to our west around 21:30Z. By 22Z, full blow intitiation was underway and we were hauling it west towards a pretty beefy cell southwest of Gracemont and northwest of Anadarko. We ended up taking a brutal dirt road detour towards Gracemont on Dutton Road before finally emerging in some rolling terrain north of Gracemont and stopping on E1250 Rd to watch a beautiful storm take shape.

We were forced to move after about 15 minutes of watching the storm and a brief chat with a nice farmer who's home was about a 1/4 mile down the road from where we were sitting. The linear mess to our north was encroaching rapidly and the storm was continuing to be pushed southeast by the front.

We passed the OU radar trucks on the way down US-281/OK-8 before stopping about 100 yards north of the Gold River Casino to watch the supercell wind it's way south, with a few gustnadoes dancing around under it's gust front.

After watching the gustnado show with a few chasers we continued trekking south back towards US-62. We decided to try and blast east towards US-81 to try and get in front of the storm one more time. We encountered some decently high winds south of Anadarko and managed to make great to time to US-81. The cell attempted one more cycle and put out a pretty beefy wall cloud before choking on stable surface parcels and withering. By now the hail threat was manifesting itself in the storm and we hurried back to Chickasha to get partial cover under the awning of a Shell as quarters and a few ping pong balls pelted Chickasha. We briefly attempted to meet up with a few friends from OU before giving up the ghost due to the storm rapidly approaching Chickasha. We ended the day at the Dairy Queen before heading back to Norman to an awesome lightning show. The 2015 season was open for business.


Chase Stats
Miles Driven: 132 miles
Cost: $35
Tornadoes: 0
Largest Hail: Ping pong (1.5")
Highest Winds: 45 mph (estimated)

Brief November 16 Writeup

Sorry for the delay on this, work and school have colluded to make the last few weeks of the semester absolutely crazy. I managed to nab a few tornadoes to end my season in my favorite part of the High Plains: the Texas Panhandle. While getting a late start out of Norman, we still managed to make Goodnight just as the first supercell emerged out of the mouth of Palo Duro. It spat out a small, classic tor southwest of Goodnight. The road options down there screwed us out of good views of the next two, but we still managed to see the Groom tornado through the rain to the north and on our way down I-40 back to Norman, managed to get a view of the second Pampa wedge as it hit what I guess had to have been a transformer given the fact that it illuminated the entire tornado and base in white. All in all, a great way to end a great year.

Last Chance of the Year?

It finally appears that a few more parting shots are appearing on the horizon, starting with this upcoming Thursday, November 6. It's a sad state of affairs when I'm having to turned to a positively-tilted piece of crap trough with a SW/NE oriented dryline and a rapidly ejecting impulse, but such is the reality of late-in-the-year storm chasing. While another opportunity appears possible next week, the fact that it lands on a Wednesday and could require more than a three hour drive presents an issue what with early morning classes and work. It sucks that I'm running into the busiest part of my year as we sail toward wintry oblivion in several weeks but such is life.  

The time change and the shortening of the days tends to signal the beginning of the end of yet another chase season and me turning back to this blog to vent the usual frustrations with the cold world at large. But with Chasercon being held in Norman this year, the wait should be marginally better with chasers from across the country pouring onto the prairie before the annual march to the dryline begins a few months later. All in all, I guess I don't have too much to complain about.

Be on the lookout for updates as winter begins to take hold!