Took advantage of a day off to make a thousand-mile chase trip for what turned out to be a relatively busted forecast area for our NE OK/SE KS target.
After arriving at 1:30 and chowing down on some Long John Silvers in Coffeyville, KS, Craig and I took a look-see at the local forecast office pages and the Mesoanalysis page and decided to prepare for what we thought would be a productive system - progged warm front/warm front and warm front/dryline intersections for later in the day served to whet our appetite, and we moved to Bartlesville to sit out and wait for the afternoon. Oddly, the storms blew way too early, and after spending half an hour mistakenly driving into Osage County, we turned back south toward Skiatook after realizing that moisture returns hadn't exactly realized yet and that the early arrival of the forcing/straighter UL winds was probably going to ruin the day.
Leaving Osage was like trying to escape something right out of a Fred Phelps hellfire sermon or a chapter of Dante's Inferno - the ground seemed to cough up smoke everywhere, and trees lay burnt and dying as far as we could see. It was so hot in Osage that I thought the widespread extra surface heating may have played a role in the early pop; it was conjecture, but I'm interested on the side if there could have been some truth to it. Regardless, the unrealized moisture had been tapped, and linear-y storms began popping all the way over to 75.
I then had the opportunity to meet several nice Stormtrack members, and got some friendly advice from Chris (... Wilburn?), who kindly lent some knowledge of the day's deteriorating dynamics, the best geographical areas in NE OK, and views of a working radar when my own laptop was failing to receive data at the time.
We proceeded east toward Chris' recommendation in Claremore, but the line kept creeping up. We pressed east a little more, hoping that Craig's prediction about a breakup of the linear bulge would realize, and ended up in the town of Pryor just as it was getting thick from post-work traffic.
Oddly enough, we began to get dime hail, even though the nearby radar wasn't indicating it at all. We initially blamed it on the nearness of the weather station disrupting the GRL3, but discovered very quickly that it had actually arrived from a new base that had formed literally right over our heads. It was ahead of the parent line at the time, and as we followed the developing storm northward from Pryor, it intensified both on radar and right before our eyes, and grew a hook just as it grabbed the tail of the breaking line like a perfectly fitting puzzle piece.
Fabian, our nowcaster, arrived home from work and filled us in on the storm's dynamics as we watched a solid wall cloud develop. The storm soon went severe warned, and as it approached I-44, became tornado warned. We headed north toward Venita with the intention of sticking to 69 and not risking the unknown muddy farm road in wake of the storm in my Civic, especially since our road turned sharply east and north again, right back where the wall cloud we had been watching was progged to move.
Unfortunately, our relative closeness ended in Vinita, where we met up with a frustratingly slow train. We had been taking a few snapshots and video grabs of the structure, and as it turned out, one of the brief vid clips I took of the storm looking directly east from Venita corresponded to the damage we found five miles east down that road (later rated EF-0). The clip is located a few minutes into my first-three-chases-of-'09 vid
here (MUCH BETTER version
here but you MIGHT need a Facebook account). Craig's picture nearest this position, and the picture we took of the overturned dumpster and other corresponding debris, are below.
We played catchup to the cell from a distance as it neared Miami and Picher, capturing a few neat clips along the way as it began to scream along with the straightening UL winds in the area. Despite the "train delay" in Vinita, we still grabbed a few more neat shots - including a brief shot of what seemed to be some kind of "roping out" feature, shot from Narcissa, OK at a distance corresponding with the feature's location over Miami and the alleged EM-reported tornado damage there. When we finally caught back up with it near Picher, the wall cloud had dissipated. Driving through Picher was very sobering - and the worst part was the sad faces of the people who still live there. Many were out wandering around in an obvious daze, likely remembering last year's horror due to the warning that had just affected them.
The day's most interesting tidbits concluded with a mini-adventure at a Missouri gas station, where a woman leaped into the men's bathroom (as I was using a stall) and yelled out the name of the gentleman she was looking for. I wondered what exactly was going on until I watched her purchase "the whole bottom row" of the fried food stand at the checkout counter, alongside her gummi worms, Pringles, Snickers bar, and three huge bottles of glacier water. She and her boyfriend were still in their vehicle with the lights on and engine off five minutes later after I finished fueling up, and her boyfriend was hanging over the steering wheel looking nervously left to right the whole time, despite nobody but me being anywhere near the place. Mhmm.
All and all, an interesting first experience and a happy chase bagging our first Oklahoma tornado, even though it (as well as the rest of the year so far) wasn't exactly top-dog quality.
