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Storm Chase: March 2, 2008

The day started off like any other lazy Sunday morning. I had a bunch of work to do, so I was relectant to go chasing, especially since it was still early in the season. The setup also looked rather marginal. However, after Craig Schwartz and I pored over the data, he simply said, "Well, if we don't go out, we're just going to be staring at radar all afternoon."

True that.

We picked up David Bodine, and off we went to southwest Oklahoma for our first chase of the season. Instability wasn't too impressive even though there was good upper-level support, so we were skeptical about seeing anything other than linear storms. We headed to Lawton, OK to find WiFi, then continued west to Snyder, OK. Once there, the SPC issued a tornado watch for our area, so we knew we were on the right track. We stopped by a church to think about our next move. Unfortunately, they were not open, so we couldn't take a much-needed bathroom break.

However, it did not take long for storms to start firing with the strong daytime heating that was occuring. The first anvil we saw was to our west, and we struggled to get data to see the latest radar scan.

There were only a line of what looked like spotty showers, so we decided to move north and east to set up camp ahead of the line. We stopped on route 19 southeast of Hobart, and watched the line of broken showers carefully. To our east were...mountains! Well, mountains for Oklahoma, but hills to the rest of the world outside the Plains. I'll admit though, the topography was a bit out of the ordinary - flat farmland dotted with lonely hills.

To our west, we could see the individual rainshafts of the developing storms. We were skeptical of any of the storms acquiring rotation, but we liked the fact that the cells were at least remaining discrete. Craig took this opportunity to "take care of business" given that we had no place to take a bathroom break earlier. He did, however, promise to aim downwind (thankfully). Afterwards, we continued east on route 19.

As we waited, and the line of storms approached us from the west, we noticed that the cell due west of us began to have a lowering to its updraft base. It was intensifying! Again, all the rainshafts were still separated by individual updrafts, so that was a good sign.

20 minutes later, the lowering continued to become more well-defined, so we headed north toward Gotebo on route 54 to try and intercept it.

Pretty soon, we observed a rotating wall cloud!

"Ummm...it's got some rotation...that thing is coning out!" David said ecstatically. We quickly pulled off and got out of the car for a closer look.

Sure enough, the northeast side of the wall cloud had spun into a funnel! Unfortunately, the funnel only lasted for a few minutes, but we had front row seats to it! There were no other chasers around, which surprised me. However, I was later told by some of my friends at OU that they had accidentally found their way right under the wall cloud and funnel around when this photograph was taken, leading to an adrenaline-pumping escape for them.

The KFDR base reflectivity at 4:43 pm CST showed a nice inflow notch right where we were when we saw the funnel. There was also a good base storm relative velocity couplet. Note the developing HP supercell to the southwest (near Roosevelt) of the Gotebo storm with the funnel.

After the funnel dissipated, the mesocyclone also began to occlude rather rapidly. A tornado warning was issued around when the photograph below was taken, but note how much the updraft circulation had deteriorated by then. I could not help but wonder what would have happened if the funnel did indeed touch down to become a tornado, but the warning was not issued and/or broadcasted in time to the residents of Gotebo.

So the irony of the situation was that as the tornado warning was broadcasted, we saw chasers race north toward Gotebo, but we decided to give up on it because it was occluding rapidly. This was a good example of why NOT to chase warnings, and to instead, always be vigilant with respect to watching the sky. We drove south, then east to try to give ourselves enough room to watch the developing HP supercell to the southwest. We ended up on route 58 just 13 miles south of Carnegie. This time, there were several chasers dotting the road, and a woman pulled off and asked us what we were watching. The NWS had just issued a new tornado warning for the HP supercell that included Carnegie, so when the woman told us she was headed there, we strongly discouraged her from going. She obliged, and turned around. The updraft base and what could have momentarily been a funnel cloud slowly approached from the west.

We watched the mesocyclone slowly lower, become striated, and within minutes, we were treated to a beautiful display of mesoscale rotation.

The structure was clearly that of an HP supercell, with precipitation wrapping well behind the mesocyclone. However, given the high base, we were fairly confident that this was not going to become a tornadic supercell.

The data from KFDR at 5:23 pm CST showed a good HP reflectivity structure to the southwest of Carnegie at base tilt, as well as a nice SRV couplet that implied a broad counter-clockwise circulation.

We sat there for a while as the meso skirted to our north. It was cool seeing the leading edge of the striated cloud push past us.

Because it was getting dark, we decided to head back east towards Norman. On our way, thanks to David Buckey's nowcasting that afternoon, we steered clear of another HP supercell that passed through Anadarko.