Tornadoes: 0
Hail: Penny
For this chase we got smart. We left Rapid City the night before at 6 p.m. and planned on spending the night in Pawnee City, NE. By 2 a.m. Central, we arrived at our destination for the night. We left our hotel at 8 a.m. the next morning and headed south to Enid, OK, which is about 84 miles to the north of Oklahoma City. We arrived at Enid right after initiation started and a particularly dangerous situation (PDS) tornado watch was out for the area.
We tracked three tornado-warned storms that day. The first one was in the Enid area. When we got ourselves into position, this storm looked amazing. She had already produced a few tornadoes and it looked like she was going to produce again. However, the storms to its south decided to be mean and ran into her. This caused her to loose rotation. She tried to reorganized herself a few times but could not get her act together. During this time, we were hearing about the Oklahoma City tornado and decided to drive south and try to catch up with it. The second tornado-warned storm was the one associated with the Oklahoma City tornado. We did try to catch up to the storm to see this tornado. However, we were not able to. We did experience some debris falling out of the sky, so we were close. Also, the cloud-to-ground lightning was very frequent. We may have seen this tornado in a rain-wrapped mess but we are not sure since all we saw was rain. We got to an area just west of Tulsa, and had to pull over in a McDonald's parking lot next to a dumpster to protect us from hail. After the storm started to pass, we went inside to grab some food before making our track back to Rapid City. However, while watching the news, we saw a potential third storm just to our south. After we finished, we tracked south to see if we can see a tornado. We experienced very heavy rain, some small hail, and very strong winds. I saw a few small trees down. However, no tornado was found. We then decided to head to Wichita, KS for the night, and then drove back to Rapid City the next
day.
Video of our day:
Some mammatus clouds that we saw while going after our first storm of the day.
So close.....
She was still trying.
And trying...
Loved the structure in the distance.
Beautiful structure.
Coming home through Nebraska. Yes, this is a natural photo.
© Heather Caye 2011
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