Target Area: North Texas (5/22-23) Central Oklahoma (5/24)
Chase Partners: Shane Adams and Bridget Geaughan
Chasers Encountered: Craig Curlee, Amos Magliocco, Ben Holcomb
Travel Time: N/A
Miles Traveled: N/A
Result: 3 Tornadoes (5/24), Quarter Size Hail (5/24), LP Supercell (5/23), Wall Cloud (5/22)
Well I'm back home after spending a week in the Plains storm chasing with Shane Adams and Bridget Geaughan (they asked me to go chase with them back in February on The Debris Show....an offer I'd be a dumbass to decline) and it was a week I'll never forget. I'll go into detail about my week in North Richland Hills in Part II of my blog but I want to concentrate on the chases we went on in Part I particularly May 24th. The first two days we went out we stayed close to home (home for Shane and Bridge) and those two chases ended in a bust (We saw some great storm structures along with one wall cloud and on our first chase got on a tornado warned cell, but no tornadoes).
Now keep in mind this vacation wasn't just to relax, drink beer, and raise hell all over the Lone Star State I came down to chase and to learn from IMO one of the elite chasers out there (Shane doesn't like looking over models that much or make forecast targets but in the end he's always at the right spot). Our first chase was practically an old school chase as in no laptop or GPS (Shane doesn't even use GPS in first place), just a road map and a scanner (the only radar updates we got was through my smartphone). Our second chase on May 23rd was more of an experiment on technology; two weeks prior to my arrival Shane and Bridget were operating as tour guides for Lanny Dean's Extreme Chase Tours and during the tour an accident occurred in which their Sprint wireless broadband card was damaged which meant no data or streaming of their chases. They did put in for a replacement card however they never got it in time, so I came up with a plan to tether internet from my Droid on to their laptop (I did my homework on tethering which included what app I needed to download on to my phone along with the drivers for mine and Bridge's laptop). Upon installing everything needed the tether program worked like a charm thus we had radar updates when needed and I got to test out my stream which was my first stream since switching over to the iMap.....well so we thought (dealt with constant data outages during that chase, it's amazing to see so many fucking dead zones in that part of North Texas we chased in). Now this was a vital thing to do as the next day the SPC was calling for a major tornado outbreak across Southern Kansas all the way down to North Texas in areas along and east of the I-35 corridor (upon going to bed there was a Moderate Risk with a 30% hatched area for tornadoes from Wichita down to near Ardmore).
Waking up on the morning of the 24th the Moderate Risk was upgraded to a High Risk with a 45% hatched area for tornadoes from Wichita to Oklahoma City and slightly south (can someone say clusterfuck as far as chaser convergence goes); the night before looking at the models Shane looked at North Central Oklahoma as our target area. That changed though when Shane looked at the models that morning indicating that storms would fire up simultaneously causing competition for the moisture and also setting up a scenario of HP supercells which in turn would embed the tornadoes in a thick curtain of rain (Shane compared it to May 10th of last year), so Shane opted to target the Ardmore area as our intial target and if storms fired up further north we'd be in position to go after them (there's two reasons behind this change in his gameplan for one the models showed storm development south of OKC to be more isolated than up north and second, Shane's borrowing his boss' SUV after the Wal-Mart fiasco which meant he had to dodge hail at all cost).
We got on the road shortly after noon for our target area, this is my first trip up to Oklahoma so I was just sitting back enjoying the scenery. We arrived in Oklahoma around 2:00 PM when storms began firing along the dryline north of Ardmore, now if you knew about the 2011 season Shane and Bridget were having add the fact that this was the last chase while I was down....there was a bit of urgency in this chase (Shane even told me this was for the most part their last opportunity for the Spring). We went up north and had gotten on some of the storms when frustration showed it's ugly face; storms to our north became tornadic along with storms to our south, the storms we were on while severe were not becoming tornadic and Shane's fear of another May 10th had came to fruition except....it was storms firing simultaneously to our south while the northern storms were the more isolated cells. To add insult to injury we once again dealt with data outages which not only killed their stream but more importantly left us chasing blind not being able to get radar updates when we needed them (Bridget joked with me about being storm killers especially while they were tour guides and that they've been cursed ever since Wal-Mart destroyed Shane's car; I told her and Shane to keep their heads up that their luck would change once I got down to Texas to chase with them, but even I at that point had a John McEnroe moment...you know the YOU CAN'T BE SERIOUS!!!!!!! type of feeling as it looked as though we were in danger of a high risk bust). All the tornadic storms to our north were going too fast to catch them and there was no way we could've gone after the storms to our south w/o core punching them (that involves driving through hail folks and there were reports of golfball to baseball size hail with these storms), hearing reports of a large violent tornado in El-Reno and another large tornado up in Canton added to the frustration. The only hope at that point was for one of the storms were on was to go tornadic, we finally got lucky.
We were on Highway 62/9 going through Blanchard when a tornado warning was issued for Cleveland, Grady, and McClain Counties and that there was a report of a large tornado sighted (we were in Grady County at the time). A little after 5:30 Shane went up the H. E. Bailey Turnpike and had us positioned on top of the overpass south of Newcastle and we sat and waited hoping for a glimpse of this monster. We were positioned east of the storm with our visibility piss poor at best not to mention we were in the inflow of the storm (just hearing the wind outside the window of the SUV was a wicked experience in itself). We were able to get a view of the storm as it was moving northeastward, it was about 3-4 miles away when we began noticing a lowering to the left of this heavy rain curtain and I began noticing what looked like circulation. At around 5:40 PM I began to notice what looked to be the left side of a large EF4 stovepipe tornado....this is a still shot from my video of the tornado (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6DBb1yho6I&feature=channel_video_title)
I was in a state of bliss at that point seeing two tornadoes in a span of 30 minutes, and the frustrations of that day disappeared for that brief moment. I was particularly happy with catching the Goldsby tornado, this is the first tornado I could deem photogenic I caught plus I got the feel of being inside of a tornado as the circulation went over us as it about roped out (this was also my first multi-tornado day and this is my first year being able to chase). We chased for another two hours going south and then east pass Lake Murray through Oklahoma's version of the Jungle (yes more jungle chasing for me). We went through the town of Madill noticing some minor wind damage from a tornado warned cell we were on, our chase ended shortly after 8:00 PM near the town of Tishomingo when we decided to head on home and the ride home was somewhat a tense one.
While going through Madill we heard reports of a tornadic cell heading straight for North Richland Hills and that Shane and Bridge's apartment was in the path (Bridge got a hold of her brother Tim warning him of the storm and for him to take cover). Fortunately no touchdown was reported in NRH and a sigh of relief was felt in the SUV, and we were treated to an awesome lightning storm on the trip back home.
This day was one of the highlights of my trip bagging two EF4s in a 30 minute span on what was our last day of chasing as the weather calmed down for the remainder of my trip, but the whole week in itself was one I will never forget and one that I will cherish for a long time (more on that in part 2 of my blog).
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