2014-12-14 REPORTS: OK/KS

[Sean Ramsey]

I left for western Oklahoma around 11am and had intended to set up in Anadarko, but decided to play it safe and target Weatherford after seeing some higher helicity values closer to I-40 with earlier initiation. After the first wave of morning rains moved through the instability picked up and storms began to fire. The bad news is they were traveling so fast to the northeast there was no way to keep up with them. But, further to the south storms started to form near Frederick and quickly moved northeast as well. I chose to travel back towards Anadarko to head the storm off at the pass. Just missing the wispy tornado to the south, I stuck with the storm up to just north of Union City and decided to let it go and go after the developing cell to the south near Chickasha.

This cell took us into Oklahoma City where we saw half dollar size hail and again with the traffic we had a tough time keeping up, so we called it a day. Eventually it produced a small tornado that touched down near Arcadia. Maybe one of the best parts of the chase was the glorious light the setting sun cast on the clouds over Oklahoma City. It was a nice chase and a welcome break from the late fall/winter doldrums. Photos from the chase:

 

[Jeff Duda]

Left Norman just after 2 PM after seeing a storm intensify just northeast of Lawton. Apparently it was already producing an alleged tornado at that point (I have yet to see any confirmation on that one).

Spent about 45 minutes just SW of Minco watching the northern storm. It never looked visually impressive. I suspect the higher-shear, lower-CAPE nature of the environment was chiefly responsible for the strung-out nature of the storms, although the deep layer shear wasn't all that strong really (only about 50 kts). However MLCAPE was generally under 1000. Never saw any hints at organized low-level rotation. Never really saw any traditional supercell structure or storm-scale mid-level rotation either, for that matter.

Once that storm appeared to be on its way out and the southern one started to intensify, we dropped south towards Chickasha, sampling marginally severe hail near the intersection of US 62 and 81. Turned around to stay in the core of that storm. Caught up to it near Tuttle and was pretty much in a wind-driven hail event all the way from OK-37 just east of Tuttle through Mustang and into the far SW side of OKC before punching out ahead of the core the final time before ditching the storm. Sampled much larger hail of golfball size or above along OK-152 just north of Will Rogers Airport. Also witnessed a lot of piss-poor driving maneuvers, including police blocking traffic while stopped under an overpass, cars stopped alongside the k-rails on the side of the bridge over the Canadian River (barely fully out of the traffic lanes), and cars slowing down or coming to a complete stop in the left hand lane.

The chase was pretty fun given the short distance and the fact that it was December. I was kinda peeved to learn about the funnels that we missed. I didn't really want to chase the storm through the OKC metro area anyway, and it was getting dark. Just kind of pisses me off how I can be on the same storm as others and yet not see these tiny ass little POS funnels that everyone else seems to always nab.

 

[Zack Cooper]

Left Norman around noon and headed West on I-40. It didn't take too long for storms to fire down towards Lawton, so we started to head down in that direction. Once we got to Chickasha, the storm was to our Southwest, and we decided to take I-44 down to get into position.

Bad idea. We ended up well to the Southwest of our storm due to the lack of exits. After attempting to stay up with it for a little while, we decided we would never catch up. Luckily storms were forming just to our South, so we got into position south Of Chickasha and followed that storm until we finally bailed on it due to it going through OKC.

The storm was never too terribly impressive, although there were 2 or so radar scans when it did look like it might try to do something.

Also, we got some quarter size hail in the evening going back through Norman.

 

[Mike Tobin]

i chased the storm in Chickasha. I saw the reported tornado however i dont even really want to classify it as since it dropped and immediately went back up it was on the ground a whole min and half no chance for images .