3/2/2008 REPORTS: OK/KS/TX

[Simon Brewer]

Got beautiful tornado Northwest of Watonga, OK: some vid stills below

I started out north of Hobart and just kept moving north as towers developed along the dryline. Eventually, I ended up on a nice cell north of Thomas, OK. I almost screwed myself, because I began to drop my storm and head south, fearing the cold front would undercut the storm, but in my rear-view mirror I witnessed incredible scud development under the base. I made a U-turn and played catch-up and watched a nice tornado develop northwest of Watonga.
I'll add more text and some actual pictures later, but here is the link to the shotty chase page I made:
http://www.stormgasm.com/3-2-08/3-2-08.htm

Simon

 

[Shane Adams]

Our chase was pretty much the opposite of Simon's. We started in Elk City and moved south along the line, sampling a storm and then dropping to the next one fearing the CF would undercut them. It was a crapshoot with a string of pearls and we just picked wrong; Simon's storm was the first one north of where we began our intercepts. Got on two t-warned storms and had two separate rotating wall clouds, one needle funnel, and some awesome flying saucer striations....everything but a tornado.

Actually a decent start to 2008, but it's a bummer knowing the only storm near us that produced was the one we chose to ignore.

 

[Bob Schafer]

I approached the line eastward on I-40 from Elk City and dropped S of I-40 at Hydro on 58. The plan was to continue S as long as it took to see something "good". It didn't take long. I drove S about 10 miles and saw a somewhat high-based rotating wall cloud to my SW. As I watched this occlude, another lowering developed to its N. I observed this funnel for about 10 minutes, but it never seemed to touch down, and I saw no debris.

Awesome for my first chase since 2006, and the best I've ever done this early in the season!

1:45 vid on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz1HxMOELt0

 

[Donald Giuliano]

Saw the same tube Simon did northwest of Watonga, a high-contrast, beautiful elephant trunk on a classic sup. It had one of the most wrapped-up mesos I've seen in a while...will try to get a few pix up as soon as I can.

EDIT: Here are a few still pictures my wife took with our DSLR:

 

[Rocky Rascovich]

Rocky's farm is the place to be!!

Michael Ratliff and I ventured out south and west of Binger, OK. by about 3pm, saw the broken line of convection take shape on the GRL-3.. was hoping to catch some isolated cells developing ahead of the squall line. We did get as far as about half way between Fort Cobb and Carnegie.. sat and watched several areas of interest where there were a couple of wall clouds that had some rotation. There was one very suspicious area I watched which may have been the Hydro storm that almost tornadoed, however, none of the storms we observed ever came close to producing. It was still great to get out and test all the equipment...and very cool hanging out with JR Henley at Jakes Barbeque afterwards in Chickasha... now, what happened at my place.???

What I suspect was a very significant downburst struck my farm... Dee and the kids don't know the precise time, my guess based on when we were looking at radar was around 7:15pm. A "wall of wind" hit the house, they could'nt see anything out both doors and they heard lots of "metal banging around" Overall, the details Dee and my inlaws gave me are vague, but this sure isn't, upon seeing what happened when the wind settled down, they found that half of our barn roof on the west side was blown off, a couple of the beams supporting the roof are gone as well. This barn roof was just replaced a couple of years ago and was built very sturdy, we've had some fairly fierce storms through here since and all held up well. Parts of the metal roofing remaining was peeled up and bent eastward, I'm guessing this was a microburst, but I'll check things out more closely tomorrow and if possible, post pictures now that I have the capabilities.. all I have to do is figure out how to do it. Most importantly, everyone is fine, my horses are fine too despite being IN the barn when this happened.

I'm beginning to get a little spooked that my farm has this bullseye on it where the near misses are nearer every year...

Thanks to Dave Ewoldt for the nowcasting and to Greg Stumpf who we saw and shared some data!

 

[Jason A.C. Brock]

ups and downs

I sampled the storms in Tillman & Wilbarger county for most of the day. I was hesitant to go North towards the better looking cells (which would become tornado warned) due to my truck making a sound like the belt was getting a little loose. This turned out to be a good move as my water pump ended up going out and my truck going into lockdown mode which keeps the truck from overheating. Anyways I saw some good structure and some weak rotation at times. Not a total bust and now I dont feel so bad for not going North. Id still be sitting somewhere in Hobart im sure lol. I ended up 10 miles from my house and got a chain tow on into home. 190,000 miles on my truck so it finally had to break down I guess. This was the first time ive ever had any trouble while chasing in 16 years.....knock on wood. Hopefuly this isnt a sign of things to come. The storms ill take.....expensive parts for my truck....ill pass.
Ill try to have pics on the website later this week. http://www.texhomastormchasers.com & ill put some on my myspace page then as well. I didnt take any video today. I was more into the structure shots today for whatever reason.
I did while being towed on an EXTREMLY curvy and rainy road have a chaser pass me on a hairpin turn. Not sure who it was but was a light blue minivan with all the gizmos on top. Id recomend not passing on that road again....Ive seen like 5 people killed there and no im not kidding. Im not sure how many people have been killed on FM 367 in Wichita County but its one too many.

 

[Brian Emfinger]

Chase Report Here

I couldnt chase very far away from home since my wife is sick with flu and I am starting to feel it too. So I left home around 8pm and headed for some severe storms that were in SE OK. They weakened as they got into Western Arkansas but I managed to get some extreme close lightning (I believe its about 100yds away).

That is cropped down and here is full version:
http://www.realclearwx.com/images/030208009.jpg

Congrats too all that got daytime stuff today!

 

[Darrin Rasberry]

Spring has not arrived.

The report of my first official storm chase is as follows: one thunderstorm (non-severe) selected from the edge of the Northern Missouri line as "harmless target practice" for the future; followed by thundersleet, followed by thundersnow on I-35 between Des Moines and Ames. Incredible that I drove 600+ miles to find the most interesting weather in my own backyard.

However, I wouldn't call my outing a failure, since it was my first chase and Craig and I intended it to be "safe." The thunder-winter-weather was indeed a landmark event in my life, more or less a neat little present for my first chase; I attempted to film from my dashboard, but the band had already dissipated. It's intriguing how little lightning appears in a thundersnow, but it's a wonder that I would have taken even over the Blaine tornado today.

I'll see if I can't hack my snowstorm video a little bit - I ran the entire length of my Hi-8 tape filming it, as it took me nearly an hour to drive the 25 miles between the start of the thunder"mixed" and the end of it; such things to cut humorously includes a continuous filming of an emergency "pit stop," since I was 100% sure lightning would go off the second I cut the "record" button for even a basic reason.

 

[Brandon Lawson]

Myself and two others were able to head out today and enjoy the early March festivites. From Norman, we drove to Lawton, chilled for a little bit, and then headed even further west to Altus. We arrived just in time to parallel a storm to our southwest. We ended up driving north out of Altus, weaving our way northeast ahead of the storm. We were contemplating heading back south to see what the southern cells might do, but the storm to our west finally showed some ankle in the form of a a small wall cloud, and eventually some of the mesocyclone could be observed, embedded within the line of clouds. Yes!! Rotation! I want to say that we were on Highway 54 just southeast of Hobart, but I'm not 100% certain. Anyway, after trailing it for a for a few minutes, it developed some significant rotation, dropped a funnel, and after getting our hopes up, dissipated. Here are some video stills.

Wall cloud with some impresive left to right motion


I'm not sure what you would call this, but it was like the wall cloud itself wanted to be a funnel.

And finally, a look at the funnel at the point where we thought it was going to touchdown....more like hoped. And you can see Bryan too!

All in all, it was an enjoyable chase, especially being so close to home. After this, we got lost in the line and didn't see much else for the rest of the evening.

 

[Michael O'Keeffe]

My dad and I chased with Verne. Michael, and Eric Carlson in SW OK. We began in Synder, OK, but decided to head west toward developing cells and watched as they crapped out quick, but then they started to get their act together. So over the next few hours we got pounded by quarter sized hail, got on two tornado-warned supercells one of which was an HP mothership and the other which was a beautiful classic storm, we also saw a funnel in the field next to us with intense motion that couldn't touchdown. Not mention the three hours of blinding rain on the drive home. So I'd say a good day, easily my best Oklahoma chase yet. Congrats to those who were smart and went north to catch that pretty tornado!

I will have pics, video, and a chase log up later today.

 

[Mike Umscheid]

First off, congrats to those that "chose wisely" and intercepted that beautiful tornado farther north. I was on the briefly-supercellular Cordell to Corn, OK storm that Bob Schafer also intercepted. Some pretty good structure at times, but the most interesting part of the storm was shortly after 5:00pm when it certainly looked rather ominous and tornado-like from my distant view to the northwest. I thought at times I was looking at a laminar funnel cloud protuding about 2/3 to the ground, but I am very hesitant to call what I saw a brief tornado, given the lack of observed significant cloud motion. I wish I was a bit closer to the feature than I was. Attached are a couple photos. More detailed account at http://www.underthemeso.com/blog/?p=467

Looking northwest from Hwy 58 near Eakly at around 5:05 to 5:10pm:

Radar image at the time (my location is black carot and crumbtrail):

 

[Verne Carlson]

Michael, Eric, Tony L and I started the day in Amarillo, drove down to Vernon, TX where we ran into Amos M. Headed north to Altus and then to Blair, OK. We headed out east through Roosevelt, OK. Not much was happening with the storms and the structure was not great. We and the O'Keefe's left the main group and headed south a bit to get a look at the tail end storm where we got hit by a brief blast of nickel size hail.

I was able to put the WW3 with the wireless cam up between storms and test out flying by the laptop which worked well except that I could not tell how fast I was climbing and was soon up so high the plane was almost out of sight above us.

The storms to our northeast started showing signs of rotation so we headed back up and caught up to them again as the now three supercells went tornado warned and started showing rotating lowerings. We saw this rotating wall cloud today with the O'keefe's near Alden, OK where I was able to fly the WW3 again but this time with the ActionCam as we were having inverter issues in the car and losing power to our laptops when stopped.

The updraft was very strong and at times I had to dive the plane to keep it from being drawn up into the storm. It was getting dark so I had a hard time seeing the orientation of the plane and had a rough uncontrolled landing in the field down the road from us. The plane hit with a thud and dust flew up in a puff, but the plane and camera was fine. Back at Amarillo now where we have 3" of snow with driving winds last night. A fun first chase of 2008 even though we didn't get the beautiful cone up by Canton, OK that was streamed by channel 5 OK and caught by others - congrats everyone!

 

[Sam Sagnella]

Oy, I just spent a good thirty minutes writing a summary, which I promptly lost as soon as I clicked 'submit' -- sigh. I'll re-write it in its entirety later, but the gist of it was that Tommy Winning and I were in the Kiowa County area for most of the afternoon, where we witnessed extremely impressive low-level rotation from about a quarter-mile to the south. Earlier though, in extreme eastern Jackson County, we witnessed a possible funnel cloud a couple of miles to our NE, but from our distance we could not confirm rotation.

Tommy was on stills for the majority of yesterday, and got some excellent shots of the Kiowa County storms. We'll probably get the video up sometime this week, which came out pretty well too.

The mystery feature near the Kiowa/Jackson County line.

Nice rounded base above the rapidly-rotating wall cloud.

 

[Brett Roberts]

I was riding with Brandon Lawson, so I won't go into too much repetitive detail here, but wanted to share a few photos. As he mentioned, we observed a nicely-rotating wall cloud that produced a funnel lasting several minutes just SW of Gotebo. For about 15-30 seconds, it looked like a tornado was imminent just west of town, but it couldn't quite do it. Overall, though, this was a very good chase day for so early in the season and so far west. Structure was fairly nice on several of the cells we saw throughout Jackson, Kiowa, and Caddo County.

Congrats to Simon, Don, and others who bagged the beautiful Blaine Co. tornado! Don, those are some spectacular stills you posted.

Full account here: http://skyinmotion.com/chase/chase.php?id=36

A few photos:

Small wall cloud west of Roosevelt (2211 UTC):

Nice structure for March 2, despite the cell mergers and competition (2223 UTC):

Funnel cloud just west of Gotebo (2243 UTC):

Very nice rotation on this wall cloud (2244 UTC):

 

[Chris C Sanner]

Wow Brett and Brandon...you guys pretty much did the same thing I did through the day. Same report as those two guys although I don't believe I ever saw em. I learned a few things about what I really need this year to be successful, so this chase wasn't bad at all. Considering how little of my equipment actually worked (the car and camera)...it's a minor miracle I didn't screw things up horribly. Considering I was chasing the way they used to in the 80s after figuring out nothing wanted to work, this was a success in terms of being within 1 mile or so from a near tornado. I passed on the Northern Storm due to me thinking the further south I stayed the better the tornado chances, DOH!

Here's some pics (full album on my facebook if anyone is interested):

Small Wall Cloud Near Roosevelt:

Nearly a Tornado Near Gotebo (I was in the middle of town filming):