Blog

Well, this is one of those chase days you don’t want to talk about, but “reliving” it might allow you to at least learn something. After chasing the Dumas, TX supercell the day before and driving back to Lubbock that night I was pretty tired, admittedly and didn’t plan too well for the 19th. The SPC outlook for the day painted a moderate risk across most of Central Oklahoma, I took a look at the models rather hastily in the morning and decided Lawton, OK would be a good place to start.

I wasn’t sure what to think of this day.  It appeared that storm motion was going to be nearly parallel to the boundary that was supposed to trigger the storms in the evening.  That meant there wouldn’t be much of a window for isolated supercells to plod along.  Anyway, I decided to drop down from Wichita into Northern Oklahoma.  Left Wichita at around 12pm.  I was temporarily distracted by the minor storms that popped up southwest of Wichita shortly after I left town.  They popped up rather quickly, but died just as fast.  After I finished being distracted by shiny objects, I continued south into Oklahoma.

Figured the day before was as good as this trip was going to get.  They say the average chase success happens once every seven chases.  Today the initial chase target was Lawton, OK.  The forecast for the day had moist air advecting in quickly from the south bringing CAPE values in the area up to 4,000 J/Kg.  The big worry was the lack of lift from the dryline, but also a pretty stout capping inversion that might prevent storms from firing at all.  In hindsight, the warm front that was across the area was going to play further north than Lawton, providing the directional shear to fire up some nice supercells in the northwest part of the state.  Had I realized that earlier, I might have been in position for the Woodward storm later that day before it turned dark.