Storm friends

26 May 2015

We had a long drive to start the day, leaving from north central Kansas, and needing to get to Southwest Oklahoma. We were somewhat concerned that with storms looking like they would initialise before our arrival that we might be late to the party. Fortunately we got there just as the updrafts were taking hold. We found ourselves at the top of a line of four updrafts and chose the southernmost one as the best opportunity, so we drove down ahead of them, getting somewhat rained on, but finding a good location between the bottom two storms.

We watched for a while as the storms grew, and showed off some of their vorticity by doing some sort of funnel cloud dance (in the image below this is some sort of bizarre cloud to cloud funnel cloud - yes, I can use the word cloud 3 times in 5 words here).

Shortly afterwards there was a brief ‘normal’ funnel cloud from the storm directly to our west, which we took the unusual step of reporting, partly because there wasn’t anyone else much around.

Unfortunately what happened next was that a big wave of cold air from a previous storm arrived, undercutting and wiping out all our storms pretty much as fast as can happen. It was an interesting, if rather disappointing process to watch.

We followed along with a couple of other updrafts but nothing amounted to much, though we got some nice views of the somewhat muddled convection that remained in the area.

We called it a day and headed into Lawton, Oklahoma, where the motel with a fitness suite with all 3 machines out of order, along with both washing machines being broken, was clearly an unlucky place!

SPC Day 1 Weather Outlook as at 06:00UTC (01:00 Central Time the night before)

SPC Day 1 Weather Reports for the day.

< < Avoiding Tornadoes      :      Avoiding the flood and flirting with scud > >