11/7/11: Tornadic supercells in SW OK

  November 7--where do I even begin with this day?  I wasn't aware it was possible to be so pleased and so disappointed with a chase.  It was apparent from a couple days out that this Monday had potential.  In OU's student-run Oklahoma Weather Lab, I'd forecasted severe storms in the target area on my Saturday shift.  The only question was whether instability would be sufficient for any tornadoes within our range, given that we had morning classes.  Three of my friends, also OU SoM sophomores, formed our chase team for the day, and we headed southwest on I-44 just after one, bound for Lawton.  Coming up to the Chickasha exit, we made a unanimous mistake.  We could see supercells off to our west, though our target was still far to the southwest.  A photo posted to Facebook by Joel Taylor of Stormchasers fame confirmed a tornado in Elk City, farther north than we imagined a storm could produce.  With only this information, we took off on OK-9 toward Hobart.  After an eternity of small towns and their associated speed limits, we closed in on the first storm of the day, picking up an occasional radar scan via smartphone wherever service allowed.  We stayed with this storm just east of Hobart only a few minutes, watching its once-promising wall cloud grow less and less defined.  (I'm strangely inclined to call the inflow tail in the first photo "cute."  I don't know why.)

  On to the next one.  We dropped west and south on OK-9, skirting the precip core of our new target supercell--driving a Cobalt I'd like to keep through a good chunk of my adult life, I've begun to pride myself on avoiding even the possibility of severe hail.  The land here, just south of Hobart, was the flattest I had ever seen, except for mountains on the southwestern horizon.  This storm was fierce-looking, with a shelf cloud looming over its outflow and dominating the scene.  It dwarfed a short train that rolled past our location.  The mesocyclone was understated, nearly unnoticeable, until it tightened up and produced a wall cloud just up the road to our north-northwest.

  The precip wrapping around the meso was catching up, and we had to move.  In my obsession with avoiding hail, I made another mistake, this one all my own: I took off eastward into a network of dirt and gravel grid roads.  We got one last look at the updraft area and wall cloud before it lost us.

  Reaching OK-9 near Gotebo, we saw for the first time a radar image of the monster storm producing an EF-4 tornado in the Tipton-Snyder area.  Just from the hook echo, we knew we had to drop down and get on it.  We raced south toward the Wichita Mountains on OK-54, taking in a spectacular view of the back of the cyclic supercell about the time it was producing a tornado in the Wichitas.

  Turning eastward toward the storm's mesocyclone just north of the Wichitas, we saw we would have a difficult time getting any kind of position.  We could only make time going east, while the storm was moving northeastward.  Nevertheless, we slowly narrowed the gap.  The number of other chasers around increased steadily.  Stopping along a back road north of the mountains and south of the meso, we saw a rapidly rotating funnel, seemingly detached from the main area of rotation.  It momentarily looked as if it could touch down, but never did.

  Shortly thereafter, we caught a wide view of the massive flying-saucer-shaped mesocyclone and wall cloud.  It was in this area I managed to get the Cobalt mired on the shoulder.  Thankfully, with three people pushing and me nudging the accelerator, we dislodged it quickly and kept chasing.

  Though we pursued the storm as far as Binger through nightfall, the closest we came to any action for the rest of the day was south of Carnegie--a brief swirl of dust under a distant wall cloud.  Had we gone east on OK-9 from the second storm and simply waited for the storm of the day at Fort Cobb, we would have seen a tornado cross the road there, but such is the nature of chasing.  Even though we're paying our dues in terms of experience, it's undeniably exciting to see sights like this in the middle of November.  We keep getting better, and spring isn't all that far off.