I headed out with my girlfriend (Kim), Gabe and Phil about 2:30p from Norman / OUN, aiming for somewhere along I40 in eastern OK. I was originally thinking about heading up I44 towards Tulsa, but the winds were veering so much in this part of the state that I though it better to stay more south, where the surface flow was more southerly. Decent instability for this time of year (1500-2200 j/kg) and strong vertical wind shear gave us some hope that we'd see a nice supercell. We sat around for a while near Cromwell along I40, watching occassional TCU bubble up and down. We finally spotted a nice TCU that looked to be taking hold southwest of Weleetka. Headed towards that storm and noticed a nice wallcloud with it, despite the lack of any severe/tornado warning (technically, wallclouds alone are not necessarily a condition for tornado warnings). The storm really started to look awesome as it neared Lake Eufala near Pierce and Checotah. We witnessed several nice wallclouds and RFD punches, though tornadogenesis failed each time. The storm began to lose it's nice appearance for a while as we headed north on Hwy69 towards Oktaha. At this point, however, we noticed it was starting to cycle up again and turn a little more right (again). We tried to navigate, semi-successfully, backroads / dirtroads to get east again. We saw a couple more wallclouds and attempts at tornadogenesis, though ended the chase empty-handed east of Warner around 7p as the sun was setting.
Several interesting things to note... Firstly, this storm largely lacked any sort of anvil feature. In fact, the storm looked highly sheared / tilted over, and relatively low-topped given the lack of anvil features. A similar case that comes to mind immediately was a tornadic supercell on 8-9-99 in southern MN that dropped numerous tornadoes, though completely lacked an anvil. Secondly, I opted to go for a low-tech chase. This meant no laptop, no GPS, no cell internet. And guess what? I learned that, while not necessary, such things very much become handy at times. Case in point -- we tried to navigate on some backroads to get from Hwy 69 to Hwy 64 near Oktaha (I think). This, however, proved unwise as we couldn't find a right-turn that would bring us to Hwy 64. Very fortunately, we ran into Dave Crowley (we tend to cross paths on chases quite frequenctly, oddly enough) on some backroad east of Oktaha. We ended up following him (though at quite a distance since we had to turn around originally) out of the dirt-road mess and onto some dry pavement (hwy 64). Lesson learned: since I have a GPS/laptop, I'm going to use it next time! AGain, not a necessity, but it makes navigating the backroads MUCH easier (and safer). The low-tech approach was nice for simplicity, but cost us some time in backroad navigation...
All in all, this was a pretty awesome chase given the fact that it's October 29th! Despite the failure of tornadogenesis, the storm possessed a few pretty impressive wallclouds for a time. Despite being very near / under the meso a couple of times, we never experienced any hail...
