April 19, 2003 Chase

(Can't I just drive to my target?)

 

This had much promise just two days before the chase that dwindled down to just "some promise" by the actual day of the event. Overnight into early morning on this day, we had numerous thunderstorms across most of western OK going through the night. In fact, there was a long track supercell that dumped 4" hail near Frederick, OK while I slept. Early this morning, the dryline was poorly defined but quickly becoming redefined back around a US 281 line in western OK back to the Wichita Falls area. In my initial hand drawn brainstorming....I picked a target city.

 

My "target city" which chasers define as either the location they will drive to begin the chase, or the location most likely to be demolished that day which makes it the best place to be. This day, it was Hominy, OK.

Tonya went on her first chase today. We went south to Chickasha to meet Robert and Shane. My thinking was that with the dryline back that far west, something may tend to happen earlier in the day rather than go to the Hominy area and wait for something to maybe happen in late afternoon. First, we looked at data from Chickasha and when the dryline approached, we made the fateful decision to go north and stay in the backed air of the beautiful chase country of northern OK rather than go east into the trees.

We stopped in El Reno to evaluate and find some food. We ate at Sid's.

While Sid's had nice "scenery" behind the registers, it was slow, overpriced and pretty much crap. I won't ever stop here again. I'm not sure Robert, Shane, or Tonya hated it quite as much as I did.

We headed further north going up to Hennesey on Hwy 51. With the dryline approaching and the best looking cumulus clouds starting to go up to our east, we headed east on Hwy51. As we approached the intersection of 74, cloud development would start and die all around us. In keeping with our ongoing "strategy" of the day, we continued north then east from Perry. By Perry, we could see in the northern sky what would become the storm of the day about 20 miles north of us moving to the northeast.

We moved east to try to get to some point where we could move north to intercept the storm. However, this was never going to happen as the storm moved pretty quickly north and northeast and we started behind the storm.

The storm as we chased east. And a radar image showing how far behind we were.

 

This radar image was from about 6:04pm CDT. As we got closer, the storm was escaping to the northeast leaving us to see

the RFD crud and a "funnel thing" in that area

.

 

The view as we approached the storms RFD area from the south. We tried to catch the storm that produced a long track F2 tornado north of Bartlesville. The great irony of the day is that if I had just driven to my target city, I would have been in a great position to approach the storm near Fairfax or Pawhuska.

Below....a map of the dive on the earlier map.

Total drive: 442 miles and 34.3mpg.

 

Kenneth