Chase was mostly okay until about 8 PM, after which I was thoroughly pissed off.
Left Norman around 11 AM with an initial target in the Wheeler-Perryton corridor. I saw the initial storms develop while eating lunch in Elk City. By the time I made it to Wheeler, the first tornado warned storm was well to my WNW, so I decided (regrettably) to head NW on 83 towards an intercept point somewhere near Canadian. By the time I got to the US 60 intersection I knew that was pointless, so I abandoned and turned SW. This was new terrain for me, and I was pretty appalled at how poor the terrain is in Roberts County...ugh. Also, the low level cloud deck held strong over my head until I got southwest of Miami. In fact, just before I finally emerged out from under it, light rain/drizzle had been falling on me for 10 minutes. A few miles later I turned and looked back and saw a weird sight: some sort of low-level wall of cloud had formed along the tail end of this deck. Weird.
I went west from Pampa and sat on a county road for awhile while storms decided what to do. Finally I was persuaded just to stick to the southern end of the entire complex, so I went south to White Deer, then southwest on TX-152. A few miles southwest of there I saw a big cloud of dust on the ground probably 20 miles to my south/southwest.
It was under a developed wall cloud, but I could not see a funnel nor any discernible rotation in it. I'm guessing this is what prompted AMA to issue the first tornado warning on this storm. Even if this was a legitimate tornado, I'm not going to count it. Do they even have an EF-scale rating for tornadoes that weak?
I decided to focus on that area, so I moved all the way south to the southern edge of what was pretty much a short line segment by that point. On my way south I was racing to find pavement before a wall of water just to my west overtook me.
I found my way to FM293, which was the first point where I saw another chaser that whole day. After that, the crowd gradually increased. I eventually went all the way south to I-40 via FM294, stopping several times along the way to view a shallow hybrid shelf/wall cloud that had a ton of horizontal vorticity along it, with numerous attempts at tilting some of that vertically. Throughout this stretch I saw a lot of modest rotation in the cloud base, and enough vertical motion at times to get me a little excited. After several failed attempts, though, it was clear to me something was missing - probably low-level shear, but perhaps it was also just too cool.
Both of the shallow lowerings in the image above were rotating at the same time. At one point, a half-assed attempt at a funnel appeared as a strand of condensation lifting into it. The scud tag had little to no vertically oriented rotation in it, though, so I didn't really think it was going to produce a tornado.
It pretty much did this for the next hour before I finally started to race ahead of it. I witnessed a large number of gustnadoes along the way. I didn't see any evidence whatsoever that any of these could be landspouts.
(Pictured above: not a landspout)
Of course I was south and east of it when it decided to break away from the line, form a hook, and produce a tornado (the tornado northeast of Groom) well inside a wet hook for which you'd have to be north and east of it to have any chance of seeing it. Psh.
The road network is pretty spotty in parts of Gray County, so at this point I decided to just fly east to find a better road network, then get north and get into the notch. I briefly stopped near the remnants of Lake McClellan (it's not a lake anymore) to peak. I eventually ended up getting off I-40 at McLean and flew north, finally far enough ahead and far enough north to start to see some structure. I planned a route north and east through Kellerville back to Wheeler. I stopped on a hill that a local had named "Lookout Hill" (I know this because he joined me after I had already spent 10 minutes alone there) about 5 miles SW of Wheeler. The view to the west was spectacular.
Apparently I was a trend setter here. I sat in this spot for 40 minutes as the storm closed in. About 10 minutes after the local showed up another group of chasers finally showed up and stopped on this hill also. After that, the chaser train arrived. By the time I left that spot, there were some 10-12 vehicles parked there and 30-50 others had already gone by. It was nice to have that time to myself where I was.
Back to the storm. It did eventually produce a nice looking wall cloud, but based on the individual cloud fragments comprising it, and in spite of the increasing easterly surface winds, I could tell it was having trouble organizing at the low levels and was most likely not going to produce a tornado.
I pretty much never saw even a hint of rotation in this wall cloud the entire time it existed (a good 20 minutes or more before I fled).
I eventually decided not to take the core of the storm, so I bolted back to Wheeler and then farther east from there. Sounds like I didn't miss much. I saw the same black smoke plume
@Jeff Snyder mentioned in his post. I was pretty much ready to call the chase at that point since storms were really going up everywhere by this point, including on top of me, and I wasn't interested in getting north to the next storm up that was apparently producing tornadoes.
This is where the frustration kicked in.
I decided to find dinner and gas up in Elk City before heading home. Right as I got my food I learned of the tornado warning 20 miles to my southwest near Sayre. I didn't see anything on velocity that made it look worth chasing. Then came the tornado reports. Whatever...that storm was never a supercell...just some weird spin-up. Why didn't any other storm this day do that? So of course I bolt back out after it and it promptly shrivels up and
appears to die. At this point, the old storm from before was finally crossing the OK-TX border and went tornado warned back near Sweetwater. I didn't want to chase it since it was pretty much dark at this point and I was already pissed about the Sayre tornado, but I went after it anyway. I ended up a few miles southwest of Cheyenne west of US 283 on a narrow hilly road. After the former Sayre storm
re-intercepted me (I thought you were dead, you POS storm...), dumping some small hail on me, and after getting out of my car to sample some uncomfortably cool air, and after the tornado warned storm stopped being tornado warned without producing a tornado and a new tornado warning was issued back to the southwest, I got really tired of playing "Keep Away from Jeff," switched off my radio, closed my computer, and drove straight home while telling mother nature she was #1 for an extended portion of my drive home. It made me get home an hour-and-a-half later than I would've if I had just gone home from Elk City.
