6/13/08 REPORTS: OK

[Kiel Ortega]

Tiff and I went a wandering for hail this evening. Left my place around 9PM for the first storm that popped in SW OKC. Found 1" hail at Sunnylane and 7th in eastern Moore. Looped around for a little bit and then came back to NE 12th and Bryant in Moore and got 1.5" measured. Then it got interesting....a lot of of 1.5" to probably 1.75" started falling. So we bailed east and took some shelter at an old gas station. After a few minutes of a lot of hail, we started south on Sunnylale and just kept on the edge of the hail. Eventually we stopped because some bigger stuff started falling and we found 2 2" measured hailstones 0.4 mi N of Sunnylane and Indian Hills. I think a bigger one fell into a ditch near the car, but I wasn't about to hunt for it. All in all, a nice Friday night with an excellent light show from these highly electric storms!

 

[Brett Roberts]

Today was kind of like April 21 in the OKC area... just as I started getting disgusted that the cap hadn't broken all day right before sunset, boom! Would've been nice had it happened just south of the OFB in the 4000 SBCAPE this afternoon, but I'll take what I can get this late in the year. I headed over to Westheimer Airport on the north side of Norman (about the only flat and treeless area nearby) as soon as I saw the explosive development of the tower on the west side of OKC; from there, I watched the slender updraft quickly anvil out, with fairly nice-looking structure that verged on LP.

It wasn't long before the anvil was overhead, given the WNW upper winds. Lightning was beautiful, including some anvil crawlers, but not all that frequent - so despite 20-30 long-shutter attempts I don't have much to show for it.

As darkness fell, I decided to check out the updraft base to my NW, which led me to Moore. I didn't find a wall cloud or anything remotely threatening, but did inadvertently stumble upon severe-crtieria weather nonetheless: 1-1.5" hail about 2 mi. W of I-35 on US-37. Ironically, this started right when I was refueling at a 7-11, so I didn't even have to feel guilty using the covering for shelter.

After that, I probably should've called it a day, but instead hopped on I-44 southbound in hopes of shooting lightning-illuminated structure once I got south of the multiple supercells now over Oklahoma and Cleveland Co. When the cell moving out of Canadian Co. took a hard right turn, I was forced to continue farther south than I'd hoped (to Chickasha), and by that time convection was so widespread that good, clear views of structure from a distance were not in the cards. I did manage this shot just SW of Blanchard looking NE at the fairly weak cell which just moved over Norman around 12:30-1:00 AM.