8/24/05 REPORTS: OK

[Shane Adams]

Chad Lawson and I targeted the Garfield county, OK cell as we flew out of Norman on an after work, impromptu chase. We took I-35 north to OK51, where we turned west until OK74, then north to OK412...all the while watching our storm continue to evolve. We took a position about 3-4 miles east of OK412/74 and watched a RFB come into view through the rain, with rising scud. For a short time an inflow band developed and struggled to stay alive against the overwhelming outflow, which won the battle easily after a few minutes. We decided to move west on OK 412.

Our winds had been from the W and northwest at around 10-15 for the duration of our observation of the RFB, and continued to be NWerly as we moved west on 412. About 10 east of Enid, our winds backed suddenly from the southeast, and increased to 30-40mph. As this happened, a new base came into view to the southwest, and looked like it had decent rotation at low levels. It was saucer-shaped, and had a distinct lowered area in the center, that looked like a broad cone. We decided to pull over and watch this develop, and as we did our winds increased even more and turned rapidly SE/E/NE/NNE. There was nothing south of us, and a new cell had erupted behind us to the northeast. The lowering southwest of us died soon, and because of this, I assumed it was possible the strong "inflow" winds we had going into this lowering were actually outflow being burped by the new cell directly northeast of us. In either case, the inflow was obviously tainted by the cool rainy air and abruptly killed any chance for a tornado.

We ended the chase north of Garber, OK at twilight. We also found gas there for $2.41. My best August chase.

 

[Jeff Snyder]

I, Gabe Garfield, Phil Hurlbut, and Jim Southard left OUN at about... 4:30p maybe. We west on I40 to El Reno, then north on 81 towards Enid. I had good data coverage the entire way, and the cell we were targeting (southwest of Enid) was part supercell and part multicell at times. As we got into northern Garfield county, the VNX radar was showing a nice low-level couplet to the immediate west of 81 south of Enid. A tilt 2 meso had persisted for a few scans before the better tilt 1 couplet showed up, followed by a brief TVS signature. As we neared Hennessey, however, outflow cruised southeastward from the storm, which related well with the dissipation of the meso. We cruised east on 51 to Marshall, then north towards Covington. By this time, the storm was starting to fall apart, though we did stop to watch a wall-cloud like feature persist to our west and northwest for 15-20 minutes. We ended up calling the chase off and ate at the Pizza Hut in Perry.

As Shane noted above, the outflow surged a long way ahead of the storm by the time it made it's way to Enid. We were a good 15 miles south of the previous center of rotation when we approached Hennessey, and we had experienced northerly winds for several minutes already. I was hoping for a deviant storm motion, but it was never able to sustain anything other than northeasterly storm motion for the most part. It did try to propagate/backbuild southwestward for a bit, but that ended when the ouflow surged. Oh well... The storm did have nice mammatus by chase's end at least.