MARCH 27, 2004 CHASE

This chase included Tonya and I where we only drove 350.6 miles.

We left home about 11:30am and drove west on I-40 with the intent to get out to Elk City and then probably work a little north.

With the early storm initiation, it was necessary much earlier to choose a strategy closer to Clinton as there were two storms in front of us to choose from. What we were looking at:


I chose the south storm based on "interceptability" giving consideration to the layout of the roads and the time involved. We drove west to Elk City and south on Hwy 6 to 152. Then, we went west on 152. A view from that road at 115pm.



My in car observations about location and storm movement.



After arriving near intersection of 152 and 34, we waited a bit on the storm and watched from there. The picture below from 1:24pm.



We moved back to the NE with the storm back down I-40 to the east and then up north of Canute. At about 215pm:



The storm continued to fail to produce a tornado and eventually we moved east to Clinton. We stopped in Clinton to quickly get gas. As we were in Clinton, the NWS issue a tornado warning for Custer County for the storm. (Always seems like a clique itself after all these years.) We headed north out of Clinton watching the storm to our west and northwest as well as we could throgh the trees and buildings. We could clearly see the first tornado in the western sky as we drove trying to find a stopping place. The only images I have of this tornado are captures from the camcorder and jacking up the contrast to see the tornado more clearly. A couple of those images:


We stopped north of Arapaho to watch the storm near a huge convergence of chasers just off to our north. I recorded video for some time in hopes not only that the storm would produce another tornado, but it could make a good time lapse tape.

We moved further north and then turned east on 270 toward Watonga. We saw the second ropey tornado of the day.



It lasted about 2 minutes and we again were able to sit and watch the storm for awhile. After working our way around the north side of Watonga, it came time for another decision. Visually, the storm we had been following looked bad, despite the very strong appearance on radar. This was the image from that time:



In an interesting decision that I knew had a huge risk of regret, I decided I wanted to see the southern storm since it was looking better all the time on radar. We moved quickly south back to I-40 at Hinton and then west on I-40 to OK 58 at about 5:09pm. We moved just south of I-40 on 58 and being satisfied with the position waited there. This was the best pure structure views of the day:



TIME LAPSE #1 I made a time lapse animation of the above storm in two formats:

Click here for a very good .mpg file (6MB)
Click here for an excellent .wmv file (windows media player 9+) (This file is the best quality for file size about 3MB)

Another even faster .mpg of above at about 140x normal speed Click here

TIME LAPSE #2 Another view from underneath the above storm a short time later.

CLICK HERE for .mpg file (about 2MB)
CLICK HERE for Real media file (about 2MB)

We moved a little further south about 5:24 pm to get out of the heavy rain to keep the opportunity to attempt to get "time lapse worthy" video. From about 6-7:00pm, we worked back to the east on I-40 to 281. We went north again. We went north and east from there, including quite a bit of time in moderate/heavy rain on some dirt roads of northern Canadian County driving east to eventually get US 81.

Just short of reaching US81, the storm developed two peculiar looking funnels seemingly out of the rain. We stopped but the feature didn't last long enough to even get pictures. We drove north to Okarche where I decided that I had no interest in following this storm across the dirt roads of Kingfisher and Logan counties after dark. We headed home.

Kenneth