10/17/07 REPORTS: KS / MO / OK

[Joey Ketcham]

Not really much to add than what's already been said. Tyler Costantini, Dustin Klinghagen and I were in Guthrie Oklahoma when storms began firing up to our southwest, we intercepted the storms around the Meridian, Stillwater, and Perkins area. I'll post some pics later.

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

Chasing. Sigh. Left at 7 a.m., got home a little after 2 a.m.....and really never stopped driving. 1104 miles and 19 hours behind the wheel, and for what? Lets see. Stressed on the KS turnpike trying not to hydroplane like the other cars I'd see that obviously did. That went on for a couple hours, my crap tires are really becoming a pain. Get into OK near Nash as things fired, only to be driving into nodataville NW OK. I slowly drove to west of Enid where I got my cell to connect around 11k. Fun getting a nws loop on that....especially when it disconnects at 90% and thinks it needs to start all over again once reconnected. Dropped se to Perry ahead of those two tail end storms, the second from the bottom looked better, but I had to keep going east incase the southern one got going. So, the view was right into my back passenger side blindspot the whole time. Not just that, but damn there's no buffer zone once you cross I35. I exit Perry and thought I'd driven into NW MO. I try a couple gravel roads, only to see most have small hills on either side with tall grass. Just no view.

Kept going east to get a better view of the southern one. It looked cold and linear. I stopped, wishing I'd never left home. I also had no sleep(3 hours) the night before thanks to too many brownies and sprite...felt like crap. I just about stayed home. Shucks. I was now wishing I'd went north on I35 for home and not driven this far east. So to drive home, or stay ahead of things and get a room later. I opt to drive back to I35 and drive home, punching the storm on the way. Well I get into it and it's pretty severe, which really surprised me. I say fine, I'll go ahead of it and just get a room later. Getting back out of that was no easy task. I was amazed how much the wind was switching directions. There was a good deal of leaf debris constantly in the air. Then the winds would start racing out of the south again. I really thought I'd either drive off the road, or a tree would land on me. Hail was also in this mix.

I get out of it and watch it head ne. I head towards Tulsa as those new cells fired east of OKC. They sucker me south at Sand Springs where I thought at the least I could do some lightning photography. Not knowing the area, I didn't know where would be good or bad. I get to Sapulpa and become increasing annoyed at my data constantly disconnecting, dumb dumb drivers(god so many slow pokes out there yesterday), and the stupid terrain. I snapped somewhere south of Sapulpa and said screw it all, I'm driving home now. I mean sometimes it seems like these idiots get stacked up just for you(right after I snapped and turned back north I get behind some guy doing 50 in a 65).

So back into traffic and into Tulsa to head north. I take 75 north, but find it closed up there, which then directs me back to the stupid interstate I came from. I take it southeast then east then up 169. I get up there aways, blowing off the Tulsa storm as I just didn't care by this point. I get to Nowata and these tards on the radio are reporting some tornado situation to the west of there, talking about people should put on their sturdy shoes(heard that more than once). Data wasn't working again and I didn't know what I was about to drive into. I could start to see the structure and it looked like garbage, which I'd assumed it was the whole time heading north. But, the funnel reports continue, some on the ground, lol. I drove into that mess to finish this long drive home.

Nothing is more annoying than rain at night, blacktop roads with old faded paint, and having crappy tires too. I didn't care though, I wasn't wasting more money on this day by getting a room. I found a couple semis to follow. They work wonders for removing the water from the road, especially if it is windy. All is well till about Ottawa KS. Somewhere around there my contacts both act dirty as hell. I was even getting a flare off headlights, but only out of my left eye, lol. That was highly annoying for as long as it did that. I didn't want to try and fix them by taking them out as I just didn't want to lose one in the process. I thought they'd soon water up and get better like normally happens. Wrong. They'd be ok till I turned the heat on. So I drove home pretty cool, windows open. Then, if I had any bright lights around, that would make them screw up again. That was strange. I guess the pupil changing that little bit would screw them up again(maybe that's not possible). I tried to look at my laptop a couple times, but bam, they were screwed up again. So just left it closed. Had to get gas, bam they were screwed up. Then, just keeping warm they were messed up the majority of the drive from KC to north of Omaha. Then add in being amazingly tired that last two hours, along with that. It achieves a new level for me, worst drive home. A couple points during the last hour I'd half felt like I'd been dreaming. I wasn't out of control of the car or anything, never crossed any lines, but it just felt surreal.

I guess a person can only stare at the highway for so long, especially after no sleep, 19 hours of straight driving, almost constant annoyances all day long(rain, people, data, crap storms, etc....contacts!). And for what??? Just to get back to where you started. Getting those contacts out(burned!) and sitting down on the couch for a bit, simply...felt...wonderful. Maybe that's why I left home. My couch has never felt so nice before. Yeah that's why I left home, to make my couch feel like heaven later. There were no idiots there(yeah yeah yeah, I know that is arguable, especially after all this), no rain, no need for data, no need for dirty contacts, one can close their eyes on it, one can lay down, .......I'm going back there.

(On a side note, just remembered....I did not see one single chaser the entire trip until I drove into the storm to head home...before changing that plan. I never dreamed that it would be possible to go that long in OK and not see any. Even after I turned around and got back ahead of things I never saw any others. Crazy)

 

[Dustin Wilcox]

What an appropriate ending to the chase season, much like everyone else we were suckered into heading down into the forbidden state of OK. From day one looking at this event I had a serious fear of getting burned by storms up near the low across NC KS, and about the time I was beginning to face the fact that our storm was junk, I took a look at radar up North and sure enough right on the sfc low there was a torn waring along the NE/KS boarder, I was pretty psyched, thankfully no reports up there. We left early in the morning after debating rather to take I-29 and play in SE KS and SW MO and NE OK or take I-35 and setup in C OK having been through the hills of MO before our decision came quickly and we began the trek south stopping in Perry OK, were we chilled out for a little while cheering on the clearing that was ever so slowly pushing east, but fearing the veering winds in place. Eventually satellite made it appear that initiation was about to occur on the dryline so we moved east toward Hennessey and the hwy 81 corridor, from there we watched and waited for convection to get its act together, eventually it became apparent to us that we wanted to be on the southern storm as the three decent storms at that point were relatively close to each other we figured the southern one would eventually cut the others off. Not wanting to deal with the OKC metro and realizing the storm had a ways to go, we dropped down to Kingfisher and moved West on hwy 33. About the time we reached Guthrie little did I know I was witnessing the best structure I would all day, the storm just to our west at that point actually had a decent structured wall cloud, that really looked like it meant business, given the distance I couldn't tell if it was rotating, and we still figured it would soon suffer as the updraft over the OKC metro was all but a few miles from raining on it. Upon intercepting the OKC storm just NE of the metro, it was quite apparent it was all but done as a big outflow arching all the way back to the SW pushed east, by the looks of radar I initially thought maybe the storm was going to complete a left split but the outflow was just to much for the storm to overcome. We kind of trailed the storm screwing around on the hilly back roads of OK more than anything, until eventually we decided it was time for the drive of shame and we began the drive home. One benefit of the storm never really getting its act together was we were able to avoid what surely would have been a massive chaser convergence, in fact I think we only passed a couple chasers the whole day and that was coming East on 33 out of Kingfisher. I'm actually kind of impressed by the performance of the models, they nailed everything about yesterday, and I still got suckered by my addiction. Bring on Spring!!!

 

[Dick McGowan]

Darin Brunin and I left late, and tried to get as far south as we could, trying not to hydroplane on the turnpike also. We turned west out of Wellington and headed towards Medicine Lodge, when I got my first speeding ticket in 2 years in the great city and county of Harper, KS. He was very nice and respectful and I deserved it, so no grudge held there. We saw a nice storm near Medicine Lodge, that was killed by a more linear storm, so we raced east to get ahead of the now merging storms. We almost beat it, but had to take a road south to Caldwell, KS, and it overtook us. Not too bad for winds, but the rain was blinding. We finally made it out of the line and saw the infamous "whale's mouth" near Arkansas City, which was pretty cool structure wise. We kept going east, hoping those cells in NC OK, would eventually make it our way, and they did just north of Coffeyville. VERY interesting structure there, as it looked like those waves recently in IA. We were trying to pull over and take pictures, and got blasted. I don't know how we didn't see it, but I guess it was nearly dark, and it took us by surprise. We completely stopped on the highway, as everyone else now was, and watched the trees bend. I love how those gusts come in little bursts, and kind of affect your hearing. Copius amounts of hail were now hitting our car with these strong gusts, and nearly covered the ground. About 4 minutes later it was over, and we made our way to Coffeyville, where we got a quick bite to eat and checked data. I don't know what happened in about 15 minutes, but wind and rain just picked up after we thought the storm blew over us, and we contemplated whether or not to go east out of Coffeyville or not. Wind was switching direction on us every 10 seconds, and Alltel's retarded data was not working properly since Arkansas City (Not that we've ever relied on data). When our radar updated, a tornado warning was issued to our south, and it seemed like a new notch was forming in Coffeyville. To make a long story short, I panicked and said screw it all and drove north to get away. Ever since May 4th and 5th, I'm done, done, done night chasing, it has installed a new fear into me that I'm sure will never leave. Visibility was garbage, so we drove north, and eventually got back home.

Mike, we were listening to that same station, I think it was 104.7 and I kept thinking what in the heck is a sturdy shoe! I thought he said something else, and whatever it was made me laugh. He kept saying they had a damage assessment crew out there where the funnel touched the ground. Those guys were pissing me off, and they kept saying the rotation was in an area where it was not, or at least I didn't think it was.

Crappy chase, and now I am sure that I am gunshy of night chasing, which probably is a good thing. I'll post pics up later today.

Edit: Did anyone see those cloud bases near Sedan, KS?? We were on a hill, looking down, and I'm gonna guess they were about 50 feet off the ground, and we were above them! They were getting pulled almost straight east into that bow to our west. I have a few pics I'll post up, strangest thing I've ever seen.
Alltel data on Highway 166 east of Arkansas City is no good till Coffeyville, and slow at best near there. I think we saw towers every 2 miles, and it would give you that error "Can not connect to remote computer." Or it would connect, and wouldn't pull any data at all. I think this happened MOST of the day, all over the place. I called them and evidently Sprint is having trouble with their towers (which Alltel shares with).

 

[Michael O'Keeffe]

Captured multiple weak, but photogenic supercells from west of Okeene, OK to Stillwater, OK along highway 51. Here are two video stills of some of the cells we saw.

The first here is a picture of the first supercell we saw west of Okeene that had pretty good structure and moderate rotation.

The second is of a definate funnel looking north out of Stillwater, OK. The funnel was fairly brief and rotating for sure.

All in all a HUGE disappointment in terms of what we expected, but I'd have to say it wasn't half bad.

Will have a chase log up ASAP with more stills and photos.

 

[Zac Goode]

Left for okc to el reno at 12pm(yeah I know,what a drive) Waited for the southen stuff firing off the dryline to get there.Watched a elevated storm with a a little structure cross I-40. Decided to try to intercept the west okc storm(looked a little better at the time).Ran down nw expressway into okc and found some hail and a nice little hail shaft. Decided to call it off there. Storms were movin on and didn't look too great...Oh well, It was fun getting out and dusting off some equipment.

 

[Wesley Luginbyhl]

Atleast I didnt have too drive to far yesterday. We initially went out by El Reno and picked up the 2 decent cells coming up SW of OKC. We were on the western one till the one to the SE looked better. We jumped on the turnpike and got stuck in bad traffic because people were parking under the overpasses, the worst I have ever seen in my life. People were parked all the way up the embankment under the overpass. I am surprised there was not a wreck. We tried to stay with this storm till about Chandler, OK till we stopped and got gas and waited for the cells firing over Norman to do something, which they never did. One cell did fired just South of Chandler though that was looking decent, so we went down to atleast core punch it. Coming up behind the storm near Sparks, OK, the storm had good rotation. As we were moving east out of town, the real fun began. All 4 cars in our group were pulled over and all received the same ticket. Just they way I love to end every chase. What happened with the cops will take longer to write than this chase report. The last picture was taken after we got pulled over. Half the photos I took this day were while we were pulled over.

Some pics from the day.

 

[Joey Ketcham]

Miles: 580

Our chase was pretty much like everyone else’s who was chasing down in Oklahoma today. Tyler Costantini and I left Pittsburg, KS around 7 AM and made a quick stop at Chris Wilburn’s house to discuss the setup for the day. Tyler and I went on to Tulsa where we picked up Dustin Klinghagen. We ended up in Guthrie Oklahoma when we noticed cells starting to develop to our southwest around Chickasaw. We decided rather than dropping south that we would instead go northeast and wait for the storms to come to us hoping that by then they'd mature some and be tornadic (which never happened), so we ended up going over on Highway 105 and positioned ourselves just north of Meridian and watched the storms as they approached us.

We tried staying with the storms as best we could, but didn’t have much luck. We got into Tulsa later on right as severe storms rolled into the area and we basically stayed with those severe storms all the way back up into NE Oklahoma. We passed through Baxter Springs, KS on the way back.. they had no power and had some damage due to 80-85MPH straight line winds. The good thing about this chase was that we were close to home so we got back home a little after 10:00. Here are some pics from the day.

Taken just north of Meridian looking southwest at the approaching storms.

On Highway 105 northeast of Meridian looking southwest.

Dustin noticed this behind us as we were heading east on Highway 105. This was just a low scud cloud beyond the hill, looked cool though.

This is my first ever lightning photograph. This was somewhere between OKC and Tulsa.

 

[Earl Faubion]

After much debate Wayne Hlinicky and I decided to give it a shot, leaving OKC a few minutes before 2:00 PM and heading west on I-40 towards the activity starting to pop in western OK. Later we switched targets to the same two southern storms others have written about and exited at Hinton and headed south toward Binger. At Binger we realized the southern storm was "tail end Charlie" and focused on trying to intercept it by going east on Hwy 152, our intent being to go south on 81 and then east on 37. It quickly became apparent the storm was moving far too fast for that to work so we opted to stay on 152, jogging north to Union City on 81, then east again on 152 toward Mustang.

A few miles east of Union City we began bumping into the hail core on the northwest side of the storm. It treated us to a brilliant double rainbow for a while. In the larger version of the photo some of the falling hail is visible.



At Richland Road 8 miles east of Union City we got off the highway to better observe the now fast receding storm. The ground was littered with marble and dime size hail with a few nickels mixed in. There was no observable rotation in this storm however the hail shaft remained visible on its left side for quite some time.

By now it was 4:00 PM and having no desire to chase in OKC during rush hour we called it a day. Since this storm tracked over some heavily populated areas we were glad it did not produce a tornado.

 

[Robert Rohloff]

Tulsa Area

I started out north of Owasso as the first line of storms hit the Tulsa area. Did get some video for station of a house fire caused from CG. Was cut off heading south by damage from first storms along Hwy 75 in North Tulsa. Finally thought the storm coming into the Sapulpa area would produce around 7 PM. There was some slight rotation but it never was able to organize.

I followed this cell east into Tulsa. It passed over my station KTUL 8 on Lookout MT. They reported a significant pressure drop followed by a recorded 55mph gust.

This storm then struck the Riverwest Festival grounds where the VIP night for Octoberfest was in progress. There were about 7000 persons there since it was VIP only. Around 50 persons were injured when two of the large tent blew down. Several of the injuries were critical or serious and 25 persons had to go via ambulance.

This storm generated a gust of 85 east of that location at TIA. We had one commercial structure that the south facing garage door blew in and the wind knocked down the entire west brick front of the building.

I talked to Bob Hall last light out at the festival. He had the radar down load from the time of the storm hitting tulsa and it showed a good gust front just infront of the cell. GR An2 showed it quite well.

 

[Sam Sagnella]

Storm chase describes quite accurately what went down Wednesday here in central Oklahoma. Tommy Winning and I were on the Grady County cell that tracked across OKC and into areas N and E of there. We initally headed west out of OUN on HWY 37 towards the Tuttle/Minco areas, along the way seeing convection firing to our W and SW. When we got to Minco we turned south onto US-81 and drove several miles while seeing both cells becoming better organized. We decided to turn west on Dutton Rd (Pocasset) and skirt along the very north edge of the southern cell's (OKC storm) precip core, so that we could maintain a view of both its base, and the cell now to our NW (later Kingfisher/Logan cell).

The following series of pictures shows the base of the Minco/OKC storm as seen from the west. I was initially bothered by the powerlines, but, noting that all of these were literally taken within a two-minute window, their changing angle actually serves as a testament to the speed at which these things were moving. (check out the hail core).

Yeesh; screaming NE.

After the inital pass that the storm made in Grady Co., we had a futile game of catch-up ahead of us, which ended at Kilpatrick and US-77 . A nice day overall, but this was our first encounter with having to keep up with such fast moving storms, and honestly, it will probably take a pretty extreme setup to get us to attempt this again .

 

[Dick McGowan]

Some pictures from yesterday, this first one, was looking down at the cloud base. It was rocketing to the west/northwest and was quickly gone. My number #1 priority from now on, is to make sure the ISO isn't jacked way the heck up.

 

[Michael O'Keeffe]

Here is a 2 minute video clip of the chase from Wednesday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-wS9pCXV70

 

[Dean L. Cosgrove]

I considered leaving the day before for a SE KS - NE OK target . There were too many negatives for me to make the trip especially with other target options.

I had planned to target the DL around P28 however I could not shake the "feeling " about playing the low around HLC . I was in the HLC area shortly after noon and decided to go with my instinct and stay with the low. I already had good heating and adequate dews. A big positive for this play would be much slower storm motion.

First pic is tower that would later be the tornado warned storm

Tornado warned storm near Phillipsburg, KS

Tornado sirens are on as tornado warned storm is just NW of Agra, KS

Dean Cosgrove
http://chasetours.com/

 

[Simon Brewer]

Didn't really expect tornadoes this day (0-1 shear was horrible), but I did expect some low-topped supercells (0-3 shear was good), which are almost as good as tornadoes, so I just had to go out. Watched storm that passed near El Reno and King Fisher, then watched elevated OKC storm east of Guthrie, then watched brief supercell south of Stroud.

link to chase page below:
http://www.stormgasm.com/10-17-07/10-17-07.htm