My first return trip to Oklahoma after starting Ph.D. work at North Carolina State was in the middle of May. It wasn't really a chasing trip. There were people and places to visit. But the timing was no coincidence. Climatology obviously favors May and I aimed about a week earlier than I otherwise might have, for fear of the death ridge setting in early in a warm spring. So on the 16th, I was in the convoy departing westward from Norman. Even the night before we had been uncertain about the moisture quality and storm mode/spacing. But the environment in the Texas Panhandle and western Oklahoma had materialized about as favorably as it could have by late morning and everyone latched onto the trend. SPC stepped up to a MDT. While we were still en route, a PDS box came out and the dryline erupted. We arrived in the Panhandle just in time. A messy supercell crossing I-40 between Groom and McLean was neither approachable on the road network nor very promising, but a new cell on its southern flank was organizing. We dropped south from McLean on Hwy 273. The base barely came into view over the rolling terrain of the eastern Panhandle. There were suspicious features moving around underneath but we let it come to us on 273.
I tend to be transfixed by a storm to the point of letting it move too far away while I stand gawking by the road. We realized the base was getting to our north and adjusted a couple of times up 273, back toward I-40. The storm produced a large and persistent cone funnel without much of a wall cloud.
The storm toyed with tornadogenesis for several minutes before the funnel narrowed and a dust cloud appeared beneath it, followed quickly by full condensation.
The tornado took on a thicker elephant trunk shape and receded into the precipitation to our north. We followed. It took a moment to recognize the tornado reappearing as we came out of a draw. We were among the relatively few chasers with a view of the dramatic rope-out over a field of blooming yucca and primroses.
The remnants of 2"+ hail, the largest I've ever seen in person, lay strewn in the grass. Many chasers positioned for a closer and higher-contrast intercept when the tornado began were blasted.
The tornado dissipated and we edged northward to I-40 as the precipitation core cleared our path. The McLean storm was still healthy, but a true monster of a supercell was all on its own a county or two south of us. We decided to race it east and intercept near the Oklahoma line. Considering the environment and the spectacular 17-minute-long tornado we had just seen, we expected quite a show when we set up on Hwy 30 south of Erick. That was not the case. The storm was going HP, to the naked eye appearing to have more precip falling in the RFD than in the forward flank (though there were baseballs and softballs flying through that deceptively clear area).
It would turn out that McLean was the highlight of the day. We made a long trip on the sparse road network to close on the storm again. Somewhere in the rain, the storm produced a deadly EF3 tornado on the south side of Elk City. We were fairly close but saw nothing, except a few ribbons of dust under the base that some reported as a tornado. There was never a chance to stop and watch again after the Erick intercept.
18 May
We played a succession of supercells in what should have been a ripe environment south of SPC's HIGH, from Hobart to northwest of OKC. Storm interactions seemed to keep them slightly elevated most of the time (there was some damage from a rainy mess of a storm near Corn and Colony). Bust. But there were some otherworldly skies over central Oklahoma after we called it a day and stopped at Pops.
20 May
Not far east of my parents' home in the DFW metro is a town called Cedar Hill, where there's a hilltop tower farm visible for many miles. I had wanted to shoot upward lightning there for years. Well after midnight, I got my chance as an MCS with extensive trailing stratiform passed over. I caught only two of what must have been 10-12 flashes.
