3/10/10 REPORTS: TX, OK, AR, KS, MO

[Jimmy Pate]

Carl Bailey, Robert Hughes, and I headed south out of Little Rock towards Salem, AR and intercepted the cell that had dropped a tornado just 5 miles to our southwest. We stopped near the Congo area where a very low hanging wall cloud passed us by. We attempted to follow the storm, but were immediately caught in very heavy hail and found out the hard way that a '96 Grand Marquis makes a poor chase vehicle, so we ended up getting left behind. Spent an hour trying to catch up, but made a couple of wrong choices on the best route to get ahead of the storm and never made it. All in all though a good night!

I attached a vid grab from last night's chase, it was incredibly close to the ground so you could see how some people might have jumped to conclusions when seeing this behind trees. (re: KARK )

 

[Brandon Lawson]

Robert, that was Brett and me in the maroon civic. We had just stopped to get a better look at that section of the storm when that first funnel came down. Neither Brett nor I took any pictures because we were dumbfounded by the sudden appearance.

On a separate note, I got a ticket for speeding near Sedan, KS on the way home when I'm pretty sure I wasn't. Wes Luginbyhl was following behind me, because we were gonna meet up to go eat dinner, and he confirmed my suspicions of getting a bogus citation, as he wasn't anywhere close to driving at the speed of which I was accused.

 

[Joshua Nall]

Didn't have to go far this time. Following are the three storms that tracked fairly close to Texarkana. The first is South of Ashdown, and taken just before the storm became tornado warned. The bowl shaped lowering was present the whole time I watched it. Had to break off this storm as I was watching it from atop some train tracks and a train was coming, haha. Didn't keep track of which storm was which on radar, but this may be the same storm that later produced tornadoes further into Arkansas. The second pic is of the second storm in the line. Some pretty good structure....for these parts especially. The third is a sampling of the hail that it produced. I headed back into Texarkana to meet up with this storm. The fourth pic is the third storm in the line as it was moving off to the NE and I was E of Texarkana. Finished up the evening with some lightning....all with less than a half a tank of gas

 

[CZandbergen]

Not much of a result but it was a good shake down for coming chases. We left Tulsa about 2PM and headed to Nowata OK as that is where I thought the action would be. Of course the crapvection was overhead and I wanted to get closer to the clearing line to the west. We ended up heading west on 60 through Bartlesville and intercepted the storms coming up from the OKC area just east of Ponca City. We ended up running north almost to the KS border but they quickly became disorganized once north of 60. It looked like the the dryline was overtaking them. They weren't very impressive on radar but managed to produce enough hail to make it interesting. We called off the chase and headed home a couple of miles south of the KS border. At the end of the video I will post below there is what may be a brief funnel spin up. It was hard to tell at the time, but the storm had weak rotation at the time and there was rising motion in what may have been the funnel.

Pictures here http://zandbergen.smugmug.com/Weather/2010-3-10-Chasing-in-North/11482132_3QZQN#807838708_FZewS

Video http://vimeo.com/10100143

 

[DMartin]

What a day... Started west of Ft worth saw some hail. Decided i'd setup in E. TX for the afternoon. That turned out pretty miserable. More hail, more hail, more hail. Then NWS SHV said they were tracking a storm near Mineola with possible rotation. So I dropped back from the storms I was trying to keep up with and headed back SE to grab that one. Saw some more hail and then decided to give up and head home due to the fact that unless I was driving a F-1 Racer, I was never going to keep up with anything. Would have followed on in to AR but had to work tonight. Glad to see some nice shots from KS/MO least you guys faired alot better than anyone who tried to catch the speed racers in TX.

BTW hellow ST, Think this is my first post on here. Ive been lurking in the shadows for a couple months.

Dustin
KF5EVL

 

[Adam Lucio]

Full report now online:

http://www.aerostorms.com/031010.php

Go read about how the motel I spent the night in lost power and was damaged.

 

[Scott Hammel]

Chased with Tony Laubach and Tom Dulong...Tony wrapped our day up pretty well with his post so I don't have too much to add. Longest chase for me in one day as we were out nearly 20 hours and eclipsed over 1200 miles. Not bad!

Youtube video of our hail core punch

Full write up on my blog

Fun day and great kick off to the season!

 

[Chris Heater]

Left Champaign/Urbana, IL at 1030am (late to the game) and my original target area was West Plains, MO. After getting towards St. Louis though, I realized West Plains wouldn't see any action till after dark so my target was moved to Springfield, MO. Arrived in Springfield, MO around 5pm. I was a bit worried that our chase was going to bust with the showers moving in from Kansas. Patience is a virtue though as around 615pm they issued severe thunderstorm warnings for them as they began to strengthen.

Once it became severe, we took I-44 westbound and before we knew it, it had gone tornado warned. As we're about 10 minutes away from the storm, we get a report from another storm chaser on Facebook that there was a tornado on the ground already. We got off at the Scotts City, MO exit and started booking it north. At this point we had a very nice wall cloud visible, but couldn't see any rotation (too far away). We eventually found the junction of Rt 96 and 97 about 4 or 5 miles north of Scotts City and immediately saw a rotating wall cloud. About 6 to 7 minutes later, we get a report that law enforcement was tracking a tornado around Maple Grove (7:30pm). It was at this time we may have caught this tornado on video (have to look at it and freeze frame it to make sure). We only chased for another 15 minutes before cutting our chase off since it was sunset and the terrain. I'll have the video up later today on Youtube with the freeze frames. I'd like to see what you all think

Although the tornado on video is still up in the air, I still call this a successful chase! It was a blast, and even if we didn't get the tornado we were pretty close to catching it. And congrats to all of the other chasers who got a tornado/other interesting action!

 

[Clarence Bennett]

Myself and Randy Bowers left Nashville around 10:15 Wednesday morning and drove to Memphis where we stopped to do some mesoanalysis. We knew everything was so capped off and were really concerned it was going to remain that way until the better forcing came in at which time it may have been linear. We ended up driving on to Lonoke, AR where we stopped and did more analysis with Randy feeling very confident Searcy would be the place to be. By that time, the storm that produced the tornado near Benton, AR had begun to move to the sw side of Little Rock. We decided to go ahead and try to intercept it as it crossed over I40 on the nw side of Little Rock. Here we saw quarter size hail and blasted back east to head up 67 toward Searcy. It worked out perfect as we were able to parallel the storm all the way to Searcy. We jumped off 67 and shot north through Searcy to hwy 16 and got in perfect position to bag this sucker...below are a couple video screen grabs and ref/vel...

 

[Nathan Withrow]

I was chasing in the area of Southeast Kansas Between Edna, KS to Caney, KS. Decided to dip South into Oklahoma since there was overcast skies in the Southeast Kansas area. Got into the rain for a few hours that afternoon in Northeast Oklahoma that killed the atmosphere over Northeast, OK and Southeast, KS for that severe weather potential. It wasn't until later in the day that the sun tried to come out, and the low topped storms started to bulid out towards Western parts of Southeast Kansas. The sun was about to go down at this time, and I made my way back towards the west near Coffeyville, KS once again that day, but it was too late to try to make it over to Sedan, KS. I had no idea that there were funnels in that area until I saw some photogenic photos and video of them. My chase target was between Coffeyville, KS and Sedan, KS originally, but I went out too early and the afternoon and gave up on it when the cold rain moved in over the area. Most of the action was in Southwest Missouri, and it was too late to make it over there as well with storm motions moving way too fast to chase them over there.

Here are some low topped clouds that were no longer a low topped storm. At one point it had a nice looking base on it, and looked promising. At this point and time it looked sick, dead in the cold temperatures in the atmosphere.

 

[Matt Gingery]

Descent chase day, although we didn't score a tornado. We did manage to get on a tornado warned cell in Newton County, Missouri prior to sunset. Moisture became an issue as many of us found out. I chased with Ted Keller KOLR/KSFX in the mobile weather lab. Richard Vogt and his chase partner Andrew joined us on the trip. Late in the chase we came into contact with Tyler Constantini and shortly after we ended the chase. Here is a link to the video shot by Ted Keller on the Newton county cell.

http://www.youtube.com/user/WeathermanTed#p/a/u/0/hZAYTYXoQ5A