Still catching up on my chase reports. As least this one is a bit more interesting than my 5/27 and 5/28 reports... Unlike those two days, our forecast/target was pretty good today, in fact we were sitting in Laverne OK when the very first cells popped up. A couple quickly died off as they moved north but one finally held together and we shifted a bit northeast to Buffalo to keep an eye on it and give things some time to develop.
At this point I noticed on the surface obs that it appeared the OFB - today’s boundary of interest - had lifted north to DDC. I started wondering if we should reposition, yet here we were in a generally favorable area and storms were actually firing. I pulled up the latest DDC AFD, issued at 1:11PM CDT, and they confirmed that the OFB had indeed lifted north:
“...This boundary may have retreated back north all the way to KDDC as we have SE winds now.”
However, they also indicated that the greater tornado potential (which they didn’t seem too excited about) was in the southeastern portion of their forecast area:
“Any tornado potential would be located across the far SE, if that.”
The DDC forecast area reaches as far east as Barber County KS and down to the OK border - so this influenced me to stay where I was.
It took a while for the Buffalo storm to get its act together but it eventually took on supercell characteristics and then developed some interesting lowerings. I thought there was a chance it could produce here, but midlevel rotation was obviously lacking as no tornado warning was issued at this time.
Shortly after this cycle, the storm took on HP characteristics and assumed the typical donut/horseshoe shape (note chaser caravan ):
We stopped for a photo op with buildings in the foreground in the next town - I don’t think it was Waynoka, it may have been another town north of there, sorry I can’t recall the name for sure or confirm the exact route I was on...
South of town, it was a peaceful scene out ahead of the storm, with chirping birds and mooing cows juxtaposed against the menacing rumble of thunder. At this point I wasn’t expecting much more out of the storm other than enjoying the storm environment with some scenic photo ops while playing cat and mouse staying ahead of the HP supercell.
Now I’m definitely sure these next pictures were taken from the road south of Waynoka. The first is looking NW, the next is N:
The storm looked nastier in the above pics and had some great cloud motion but looked “outflowy”. I was quite surprised when a tornado warning alert went off on the cellphone in my pocket. To my knowledge this is the first time a TOR warning was issued on this storm.
We shot up north on 281 into the storm to take a look and see if we could get into the notch. We were quickly enveloped in rain, and visibility was poor from that as well as trees lining the side of the road. We stopped to take a look at the map to consider whether we could safely get to Waynoka and head east out of there on 281 or use the stair stepping road southeast that branches off of 281 south of Waynoka. By now the couplet was west of due north of us. We continued north slightly but as we started to get into hail we thought the better of continuing deeper into the storm due to the hail (not huge, but we were in a rental), the low visibility, and the generally dangerous hook slice that this particular approach would have entailed. So we bailed out south, watching the RFD rain curtains wrap across the road in front of us. We went east on 412 to stay with it, but it became outflow dominant and weakened considerably before too long.
By the way, there had been a storm in the TX panhandle that had tempted us earlier... IIRC, the HRRR model had depicted a couple of isolated supercells moving out of the panhandle...
We spent the night in Woodward. From the hotel parking lot, grabbed this shot of the sun-lit back side of another storm, and watched its near-continuous lightning in the distance after dark.
It was an enjoyable chase day, the first such day of my 2018 trip and believe it or not probably the best day since the big Dodge City event in 2016 because my 2017 chase trip featured only two chase days, neither of which were as good as this. So I went to bed feeling happy about the day, it was a bonafide supercell chase day with a realistic tornado possibility. I was reasonably content with our forecasting and execution. But then in the morning I found out about the tornado near DDC, which even made the mainstream news. Nothing is worse than telling people at home about a chase day that was enjoyable even without a tornado, and then next thing you know they’re asking if you saw the tornado they saw on the news. Well I guess there’s a life lesson here, if you feel happy with something, why should your perspective change just because something better might have happened somewhere else? Easier said than done, though... In retrospect it makes sense that a tornado occurred where it did because the OFB had lifted north - and I had noticed that when I may have still had time to adjust position - but why did the DDC office underplay the tornado potential and say it was more likely to be in its southeastern zones, even as the same AFD acknowledged the northward movement of the OFB? I can’t imagine going with my own gut rather than the professional meteorologists... And judging by chaser volume on the roads, it seemed like at least 90% of all chasers, including many tour groups, had stuck with the OK target too... Another mystery to add to the list; even more frustrating than missing stuff is coming home with so many unanswered questions...
EDIT: for proper pictures and placement within text as well as grammar
