2013-05-19 REPORTS: OK/KS

[Jeremy Jones]

I started out today in Kingfisher, on the CU field that was developing off the Dryline. Got on the initial storms as they went up over Calumet. Stayed with that storm until Edmond, Ok. Then finally filmed the Edmond tornado from Arcadia, Oklahoma.

I was also able to roll some pretty decent footage of it as well...I ended up letting this storm go by, and called my chase to go and check on my place of employment at 15th and Coltrane in Edmond. Literally 1/2mi from the woodshop I've worked at for almost 10 years! Luckily it was spared. Here's my video: DISCLAIMER: There is some foul language in the video...(Sorry, I get excited sometimes!)

Watch video >

 

[John Gnuechtel]

I got this about a mile north of the Edmond tornado before it fully lifted. I started the day in Stillwater, and moved down to Guthrie when the first radar returns began showing up on the dry line. Kept moving toward it from there, into the type of tree-filled, hilly chase territory people warn about in these parts. After popping up to get the picture, I tried to keep up by going east on 66. It was a slow moving chaser parking lot peppered with emergency vehicles, so I pulled over, watched for a bit, and then turned around and found a hotel for the night.

 

[Winston Wells]

Mods: Please add KS to thread title

I began the day in Wellington, KS and spent the early afternoon waiting in Winfield, KS. I was somewhat surprised to see the first cell go up well west of I-35 near Harper, KS, but the tops looked good so off I went after it. The cell looked increasingly good on radar, showing classic supercell characteristics before it turned into an elongated mess just southwest of Wichita. I caught the cell's first very brief tornado a few miles south of Viola, KS on K-49. The view here is to the west:

I then moved back east of I-35 toward Belle Plaine, KS and messed around with the resulting line of storms by gradually moving south, ending up with lots of other chasers in Ark City, KS. I then opted to make a futile dash south on US 77 toward the OK storms, but I was never able to catch up to them. Ended the day in Shawnee, OK.

 

[JamesCaruso]

If Saturday was an epic failure, then I need a new superlative to describe Sunday's screw-ups... Look at the SPC storm reports map this morning, find the one gap in northern OK with no reports between the red dots clustered in southern KS and in central OK, and that's where we were.

Targeted an area between Enid and I-35, which seemed like a bulls-eye forecast verified by the SPC MSD that preceded the OK tornado watch. Was not tempted by the KS activity, which was not in our target area, was on the cold front, and did not seem as discrete. Successfully resisted the temptation to go after the storms that went up far to the west near Alva. However, we also resisted the temptation to go after the first cell going up to the south near OKC, especially after being too quick to pull the trigger on one of the earliest cells in KS the previous day, chasing it all the way north and missing the tornados others got on the more southern storm...

We could not understand why no storms were going up between OKC and us... We were just east of a mesolow/triple point where a pre-frontal trough and dryline intersected; Enid was 86 over 72 with 25 knots out of the SSE... There was plenty of "room" for another supercell... What makes failure worse is not even knowing WHY or what we could/should have done differently... Was it a forecast error? Or was it a good target that simply didn't pan out, just a natural variation that comes with the territory??? I may start a new thread to solicit thoughts on this...

Anyway, we waited too long before finally going after the southern storm. As you can imagine, it was a long ride getting around it from the north, and painful looking at the textbook perfect radar image... We were in Drumright OK when the base finally came into view with a huge wall cloud. We began following it - and it promptly fell apart! We bailed on this storm as the radar reflectivity rapidly turned from red to orange, and waited on the next cell moving up through Drumright. It was only severe warned at the time, but as the base came into view it began tightening into a nice barrel and it was tornado-warned. Within several minutes it, too, fell apart!

Made a half-hearted run for the now southernmost storm. Could not believe the velocity couplet solidly embedded within the precip, nowhere near the area you would "expect" it to be based on the reflectivity image... Drove through Slick, which was in the path of this storm, and stopped for gas. The attendant knew about it but we showed her the radar and projected track of the storm and stressed the need for her to be safe. Not too long after, as we drove east ahead of it, the couplet disappeared and, with only an hour or so of daylight left, decided to abandon any hope of getting into a good viewing position for this storm and drove up to Tulsa to put an end to our misfortunes for the day.

Sure hope the past two days don't end up being the best opportunities of our chase-cation, which runs through May 30...

 

[Hannah.Taylor]

Started the day targeting Enid with James Siler, Marcus Diaz, Brady Kendrick, and Marcus' girlfriend, but we ended up in Nash, OK on a gorgeous multi-layered cake supercell hovering in a field. It produced a funnel but never touched down. Appears the storms to the NW were dragging the outflow boundary with them, and taking all the energy from our storm. We made a play on the Bristow storm but it never could get it's act together. There were a few funnel drops but no contact with the ground. As a last resort we tried to make a final play on the monster tornado coming out of Shawnee, but there was simply too much rain to see it. As with the Bristow storm, the Shawnee tornado seemed to encounter a more stable air mass and lost its ooomph so to speak.

Supercell in Nash, OK

Mammatus over Nash, OK

The structure was fantastic and the shear up above these towers was amazing!

But for good measure we can confirm a Jay McCoy and a David Drummond sighting on the way up towards Enid.

Bristow, OK storm with wall cloud and funnel cloud. Storm was rotating nicely, it just couldn't get its act together.

going again today for round 3...still hoping for that tornado!

 

[Sean Ramsey]

I began the day leaving the OKC area and went north on I-35 anticipating storms firing up west of I-35 then move through the northern corridor, and sure enough development along the KS/OK border area had started, but we played the middle between the border and OKC so we had a decision to make seeing that storms were also going up in OKC. The southern storms looked messy at first and the northern storms had good organization and had already gone tornado warned, so we chose north. We got up to near Wellington and saw a beautiful rope tornado that didn't last but about 5 minutes or so, but got good shots of it. Then the storms lined out and we decided to move south back to OKC to catch the southern storm that eventually went through Shawnee. By the time we got there the tornadoes already went through, and just like 2011 I was about 10 minutes late.

The South Haven, KS tornado:

 

[Bryce Stone]

I made it to just south of Carney in time to see the tornado shortly before it entered the south side of town. This was the first tornado I'd seen in six years. Then headed back down 177 and saw the second tornado shortly before it hit the intersection of 177 and I-40.

 

[Brandon Jenkins]

We also targeted north central Oklahoma and made our way west to the supercell near Nash, OK. It put on a brilliant display during it's short life cycle but it met its demise after running into the rapidly growing line of junk from the north. After straddling the OK/KS border for the better part of the day (knowing we couldn't make it back to the cells E of OKC) we called the chase. I suppose I can't complain about missing out on tornadoes with structure like this.

 

[JamesCaruso]

From Hannah.Taylor: "Started the day targeting Enid with James Siler, Marcus Diaz, Brady Kendrick, and Marcus' girlfriend, but we ended up in Nash, OK on a gorgeous multi-layered cake supercell hovering in a field. It produced a funnel but never touched down. "

Great pic of the Nash storm; can you tell me what time it was taken?

Thanks!

 

[Bill Hark]

I'll post a full report later. Below is a link to my video of the Shawnee, OK tornado. Watch video > Bill Hark

 

[cdcollura]

Good day all,

I was on the tornadic supercell storm near Wichita, Kansas.



Above: First tornado SW of Wichita, KS.



Above: Developing large tornado (right side of picture), that went through SW Wichita.

 

[Hannah.Taylor]

From Hannah.Taylor: "Started the day targeting Enid with James Siler, Marcus Diaz, Brady Kendrick, and Marcus' girlfriend, but we ended up in Nash, OK on a gorgeous multi-layered cake supercell hovering in a field. It produced a funnel but never touched down. "

Great pic of the Nash storm; can you tell me what time it was taken?

Thanks!

We caught that around 2:54 PM Central Time (I'm showing that as the time I uploaded the shot I took from my cell phone to facebook)...and we were there a good 10-15 minutes before we moved on. My camera shots were taken right after that, so within a minute or so of that time.

 

[Dan Robinson]

Initially had my eye on the outflow boundary from the previous day's MCS, but got lazy and didn't want to drive all the way down to where it ended up. I started on the Wichita storm, then ended up where I would have been had I stuck to my original thinking. A tornadoless day.

http://stormhighway.com/blog2013/may1913a.shtml

 

[Brett Roberts]

Initially had my eye on the outflow boundary from the previous day's MCS, but got lazy and didn't want to drive all the way down to where it ended up. I started on the Wichita storm, then ended up where I would have been had I stuck to my original thinking. A tornadoless day.

http://stormhighway.com/blog2013/may1913a.shtml

You're not the only one who came up completely empty. This was one of the most painful screw-ups I've ever had. Or, at least it was for about 24 hours; but I digress.

I knew there was big potential in and immediately E of the OKC metro area, but the combination of traffic, stoplights and terrain mean that I will *never* target this area intentionally, unless it's clearly the only play. As such, I meandered up I-35 to Blackwell, then got suckered N when the Wichita storm produced. In trying to hedge between intercepting it (once it emerged from an urban environment around Andover) and the trailing cells down into Kay Co., I remained around Rose Hill and Udall. This was too far E to observe any of the tornadoes with those cells, all of which produced very early and then went outflow-dominant. Then, as soon as I saw the early evolution of the incipient Edmond storm, I knew I'd backed myself into a corner; road options to get S quickly in NE OK are almost non-existent.

Like you, I rocketed SE nonetheless -- slowed significantly by towns such as PNC -- and continually arrived on supercells which were feeling the cap after more than an hour of significant tornadic activity. It is uncanny how many times I've left OUN and missed visible tornadoes within miles of my apartment just in the last three years alone (5/10/10, 4/13/12, 5/19/13, 5/20/13). On all of those days except 5/10/10, potential that appeared roughly homogenous over large areas was only realized (in a big way) inside the least-chaseable ~30x30 mi. area covering the densely-populated OKC metro. Beyond frustrating.

 

[Paul Schmit]

Recently relocated to Albuquerque from the east coast and have little chase experience on the Plains, so decided for this first Oklahoma chase to play it overly safe and park right on the dryline with the hopes that discrete cells would form with enough separation to leave a gap through which I could get out in front on my own terms. Parked up near Enid prior to initiation to leave the KS option on the table, but raced south on 81 when the flare up began west of OKC. Spent the rest of the afternoon behind the Edmond and Shawnee supercells, but my efforts to maneuver around to the updraft bases were foiled by city traffic, lack of familiarity with the metro area road system, and poor visible contrast under the storm bases due to the abnormally early time of day and the attendant high position of the sun.

Was about 15 minutes behind the Shawnee EF4 trying desperately to catch up to the twin coupled-supercell arrangement the wreaked havoc on the southern suburb, only to spend another half hour chasing it eastward on I-40 till sundown, after which I encountered the massive traffic jam on westbound I-40 after they shut down the highway due to the tractor trailers that had been tossed around.

The chase was grueling enough that it became very clear it's a much sounder (but still safe) strategy to place oneself ahead of the point of initiation, perhaps an hour or so into the anticipated storm's trajectory, making sure one has plenty of north/south options in case the situation becomes untenable (HP/line formation/etc). Hoping next time I can find someone to share the duties with, and perhaps learn a thing or two from someone with more operational knowhow.