Saturday 3/9 forecast

Social media's already starting to light up with talk of Saturday as a possible chase day.  Greg Forbes is leading the charge with a "TORCON" of 3 in W OK, I think.  The setup is still fuzzy.  The Euro has an upper low centered over CO by Saturday evening, while the GFS keeps it farther southwest and almost cuts it off a little bit.  Both models forecast a modest surface cyclone centered around the N TX Panhandle, the OK Panhandle, and SW KS.  The Euro leans toward a broader, weaker low.  Even the GFS only manages to advect mid/upper 60s surface temps and upper 50s dewpoints into the area of interest; I have to imagine the Euro solution would result in even less favorable low-level conditions.  The GFS solution has <750 CAPE along the dryline except for a little bullseye in KS.  Forecast hodographs are unconvincing as well, with less than impressive low-level shear and a weird kink around 500 mb.  Unless model guidance changes a lot, I don't expect more than maybe a short drive west for lightning after dark.  Even shelf cloud shots along a squall line would be tough, with a lot of cloud junk around.

2013 so far

The only real weather events here this winter have been a severe weather bust, an underperforming snowstorm, and a blizzard that missed OKC-Norman.  The pattern gets a lot less interesting now, if you believe long-range models.  This might be all until the first real spring outbreak, so here:

Tough forecast in OK

It's 12:30 Thursday morning.  With another winter storm brushing the area, it's a hard call for forecasters along I-40 as far as rain/sleet/freezing rain.  Snow looks likely in far northern OK, and rain is certain to the south.  It's a classic problem that comes out at least once a winter in central Oklahoma, and one that requires a look through multiple layers of the troposphere.  RAP forecast soundings show a large "warm nose" from ~700 mb to ~925 mb, with temperatures diving well below freezing around 950 mb, then rising back to within a few degrees of the freezing mark at the surface.  NAM had been leaning this way since Wednesday morning in the OKC area.  RAP suggests moderate ZR from OKC or Shawnee eastward along the I-40 corridor into Arkansas, extending northward through the northeastern part of the state--Tulsa certainly included.

Currently, Mesonet observations indicate lowest dewpoints in eastern Oklahoma--generally upper 20s.  Get a little precip falling into that, and surface temps hovering at freezing will drop sufficiently for a significant icing event.  Based on those observations, as well as numerical guidance, I might as well throw out a forecast:

OKC:  Some freezing rain early morning with little accumulation.  Any icing will be very short-lived as the surface warms.

Norman:  Rain.

Locally significant freezing rain event in eastern/far northeastern OK, including:

Vinita
Miami
Jay
Tahlequah
Sallisaw
Stigler
Eufaula
Checotah
Okemah

All I've got time for.  Back to math.

Summer 2012: DC3 and drought

   Noticing that my two latest posts have been about serious stuff (took down a lengthy Chick-fil-A one to save space), I figured it was time for a weather-related entry.  Last year I lumped the whole summer's weather into one piece--it wasn't hard since I'd been in the Mountain State--and I'll just do the same this year.

   I had the chance to stay in Norman this summer, working for a National Severe Storms Lab scientist named Dr. MacGorman.  The day-to-day part of my job is data retrieval, processing, and archiving for the Oklahoma lightning mapping array (LMA).  The part you'd be interested in was a field project from May 15 to June 30, Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry (DC3), which involved all kinds of government agencies and a lot of researchers from around the nation.  The overall objectives dealt with how thunderstorms affect the chemistry of the troposphere, particularly how they transport substances from near the surface to the upper troposphere.  Where Dr. MacGorman and our team came in was taking in situ measurements of thunderstorms via balloon, as mobile radar crews and specially instrumented aircraft sampled the storms simultaneously.  We launched balloons that, when inflated, filled the back of a full-size U-Haul truck--which is exactly what we used to get them to launch sites.  Attached to each balloon, at least at first, were a particle imager, an electric field meter, and a regular radiosonde that measured temperature and humidity, as well as tracking devices.  As the project progressed, our balloons kept falling after reaching only 3-4 km into the atmosphere.  Since we were shooting for several times that altitude, the instruments for our final few launches were split between two balloons, which then topped 20 km.  Getting paid to chase storms was exhilarating, if sometimes exhausting, and I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.  Here are the highlights.

May 19:  DC3's first Oklahoma chase took us to the dryline in western/northwestern Oklahoma for high-based severe thunderstorms.  We stopped at an intersection at Leedey as the young storms grew.  The mobile mesonet (minivan with instruments on top) was my vehicle for most of the project.

We moved south to Moorewood to intercept and launch.  Two launch sites were decided against before we wound up in an open field near a small oil or natural gas facility.  

We launched successfully, though the balloon didn't reach its desired height.  At Arapaho, after the launch, we were treated to spectacular mammatus.

May 25:  After spending hours in an Altus, OK, gas station/Burger King, we ran down a left-moving severe storm near Erick.  We launched amid a barrage of close CGs but the instrument train dropped off the balloon before reaching cloud base.  A nice sunset was little consolation.

I spent the next week in Silver Spring, MD, at NOAA headquarters, for a scholarship orientation with three fellow rising juniors from the School of Meteorology.  We missed the best chases of the summer.

June 3:  Equipment failures made a trip to Memphis, TX, a total fiasco.  No launch.

June 4:  Paydirt in the middle of nowhere, roughly in the vicinity of Paducah, TX.  This was after driving through high winds and blowing dust to reach the storms.  We were surrounded by unsettlingly close CGs from launch time long into the night.  

June 12:  We blasted from Norman to Lubbock, TX, and immediately were in pursuit of supercells only a county away from the New Mexico border.  All the storms were splitting, and we positioned ourselves to catch a split from the only storm that didn't.  It left us in the dust, accelerating northward, and we proceeded to invade an IHOP near Texas Tech's campus.  We stayed up through the wee hours of the morning on the 13th to intercept an MCS moving into the Lubbock area.  It fell apart on top of us, yielding essentially no data, but letting us practice our new two-balloon procedure in driving cold rain.  Here's mammatus from the storms near New Mexico, in Seagraves, TX.

June 16:  It was one of several long, frustrating, and sometimes plain strange days wandering central Oklahoma in search of elusive pulse storms--ask me about the machete-waving motorcyclist in Binger sometime.  Persistence paid off with our best intercept.  We caught a severe storm just south of I-40 near Hydro, OK, and launched two balloons with lightning striking all around.  It was the first time I thought we were in serious danger from lightning, as we stood on top of a hill at an oil or gas platform and watched rapid-fire CGs hit in a valley below us.

We punched through this storm on I-40 in search of bathrooms around Hydro.  It was an intense experience to be piloting the mesonet.  Later, at a crop duster airstrip roughly north of Alfalfa, OK, a few crew members had their hair stand on end with a couple very close lightning strikes from decaying storms.  After the danger passed, the full arc of a double rainbow appeared.

   At the tail end of DC3, Oklahoma was plunged back into the bone-dry oven that is summer in the Southern Plains.  Norman went many weeks without receiving 0.1" of rain in a day.  Wildfires ravaged central and northeastern parts of the state, including a large area just south of Lake Thunderbird.  Flash forward to the last weekend of summer.  August 18 finally brought rain to central Oklahoma in the form of two morning/early afternoon sub-severe MCSs.  Here's the first one near Lexington, OK, and a roll cloud with the second one as it approaches OU's campus.

Higher education, not reeducation

Let me note again...my personal beliefs and views are my own and do not reflect those of my university or my employer.

   I have been informed that summer is over--rudely, by OU's don't-forget-classes-start-tomorrow mass email, and kindly, by the cool breeze through Essex Square's top landing.  So, back we go.  Or for you freshmen, here we go.  Don't worry.  We're all mad here.

   I guess it's mostly to new college students who are Christians, or who are considering becoming Christians, that I'm directing this post.  We can all relate to what you're about to encounter, but it's going to be nauseatingly fresh to you when it first reaches your eyes and ears and heart.  And just as I'm no longer offended by the compost aroma carried on the south wind directly to the National Weather Center parking lot, some of us geezers in our twenties have blocked out this stuff for long enough that we don't notice it anymore.  We might forget to prepare you, to the degree that we can.  So on behalf of us all, if you are attending a public university, here is your fair warning.

   No matter what you know to be true, no matter what everyone you love and respect has taught you, and no matter what has been accomplished in your own life, you will be presented with the following as facts in the near future:

Your life is dull.

Your standards are intolerant.

Your religion is hypocritical.

Your faith is unreasonable.

Your God is a lie.

   You can choose to accept these statements at face value, or you can challenge them.  That choice is yours and it's a monumental one.  I can't speak for the other side, but I chose to challenge this worldview.  I admit my execution of that choice has been shaky, but I have never reconsidered or regretted it.  When your professors and colleagues and friends give you these "facts," it really is okay to call their bluff by the way you live.  Here's how to start.

1.  Don't be conformed.

I can't understand the allure of wandering up the middle of the street at 1 a.m. Sunday, on your way out for the night, walking so you can become incapable of driving.  Of course it's fine--often necessary--to be a follower.  Just remember that the world's best followers are little furry guys called lemmings, famous for achieving terminal velocity en masse.  Know who you follow and why.  Be secure in standing out from the crowd.  Being in the minority doesn't mean you're alone, and it sure doesn't mean you're wrong.  Narrow is the gate.

2.  Beware of power distance.

In my introductory communication class last spring, we discussed the idea of power distance--how much of a person's authority or power in one area of life carries over into other areas, or how far that kind of power can get you.  Be aware of this phenomenon.  Your professor may be a brilliant scientist, and he or she deserves your respect in that field, but that doesn't make him or her a spiritual authority.  Faith is not science.  Many elite minds can't comprehend this.  The funny thing is, God meant for it to be that way.  Read 1 Corinthians 1:18-27 to see what our God thinks about this world's intellectuals and scholars.  When you hear precisely those people ranting about how foolish we are, it should bolster your faith because Paul, writing by the Spirit, knew two millennia ago that it would happen.

3.  Elect to receive.

I always cringe a little anytime OU's football team wins the coin toss and defers to the second half.  They're so explosive that if they start with the ball, they could very well be on the scoreboard within two minutes.  That sends a clear message to the other team and in OU's better seasons, the game is often over in the first quarter.  You have the same potential.  When you walk on campus, you've won the coin toss--choose to receive!  Take charge from the get-go by getting heavily involved with your church family.  Don't just play defense, trying not to give too much ground to temptation.  Go on offense, get stronger in your faith, and help reach out to others.  Draw first blood.  Put your adversary in a deep hole before anybody knows what happened.

  I hope this gives you a hint of what to expect on campus.  In spite of the challenges you'll face, the positives outweigh the negatives.  Maybe the biggest thing is that your faith becomes your own.  Nobody will wake you up on Sunday morning or keep an eye on you with the opposite sex or stay up till you come home at night anymore.  It is entirely between you and God.  In the face of so many new tests, your faith might not be all you want it to be for a while.  Mine still isn't.  But it's really yours, and you're better off working on a flawed, authentic faith than coasting along on somebody else's.  You're going to love the Christian college life.  I promise.

High risk in Oklahoma, 4/14/12

"Do you know how the clouds hang poised, those wonders of him who has perfect knowledge?" (Job 37:16)  This video frame from just outside Cherokee, OK, pretty well describes northern Oklahoma on Saturday.  It was by far the most successful chase anyone in our group has had--thanks to Tim and Branden for driving.

   With all the day 2 high risk hype for Saturday, Friday was overlooked as a tornado day.  I left work about 2:30 as the Norman supercell took form out across I-44 near Chickasha, since I was planning to leave for a church retreat in Madill at 4:15.  I called our campus minister at the Westside church of Christ as the hook echo became well-defined and learned he had already decided to delay leaving Norman.  In disbelief that this large right-turning supercell with a velocity couplet was not tornado-warned, I went to Hwy 9 on the west side of I-35, to spot as much as to chase.  A foray right up to the precip core, followed by a speedy retreat eastward, brought me to the Sonic across the highway from Riverwind Casino.  I watched curtains of rain wrap from south to north into the circulation, increasing in speed, and realized a tornado was spinning up less than a mile in front of me.  I ran back to the car and the college-age guy in the spot next to me casually asked, "Are there gonna be any tornadoes today?"  "I think that's one RIGHT OVER THERE," I said and drove off, calling NWS Norman as I dropped south on I-35 to avoid the outer edges of the rain-wrapped tornado.  Just as I got out my description of the forming tornado, I got the "call failed" tone, and that was the last phone call I got through to anybody for a half hour or more.  It's unclear whether my report was what earned Norman a tornado warning, but I like to think it had a part.  My video from Sonic is so shaky and dark that it isn't worth posting, but that wasn't my main concern at the time.

   I turned around and headed back north to Norman once it was clear the danger had passed, and saw damage up 24th from Hwy 9.  Taking 9 eastward out into rural parts of Cleveland County, I watched various areas of rotation and ascent at the back of the storm, catching a brief funnel on the far eastern outskirts of Norman.  Little Axe was a convenient and necessary stop for a couple gallons of gas before closing on the storm near Pink.  I met up with three friends and fellow chasers/met students in another car and we chased together from there, drawing extremely close to two areas of rapid rotation on Lake Road west of Shawnee.  We followed the storm west to Shawnee and saw a brief tornado several miles to our north, so far away and short-lived that nobody has a good photo of it.  It was about that time I finally got through to our campus minister, who told me the Norman tornado had struck the church building with a group of people inside waiting to leave for the retreat.  Thankfully, everyone there was uninjured, but the building's roof was peeled off in places and trees outside were uprooted or broken.  The decision had been made not to hold the retreat due to the damage and the expectation of more storms.  First and above all, I was relieved that my friends there were kept safe.  We were all a little disappointed that the weekend was canceled, but it was a small matter in comparison.  Pretty quickly after that, though, I started thinking about Saturday.  It had never occurred to me that I wouldn't be in Madill during the weekend outbreak, but now I was going to be chasing my first high risk day.  How often is road tripping to the atmospheric display of the year your backup plan?

   On to the exciting part with pictures.  Saturday was a circus in northern Oklahoma, and it was typical of the day that our little caravan comprised two cars with five people in each.  Our jumping-off point was Fairview, OK, a small town that we later realized was not all that small compared to others in the region.  It was my first trip to northwestern Oklahoma and the area is just as remote as it appears.  Cell service is spotty at best, and data is available maybe a third of the time.  There was a Sonic in Fairview where our group spent an hour or so watching storms blow up on radar, unwilling to run to the dryline if there was a chance of anything initiating ahead of it and becoming dominant.  Finally, we headed through Seiling to Woodward on the first tornado-warned storm that came close to Woodward.  Chaser traffic became evident in Woodward and was present for the rest of the day.  The car I was in, with Tim driving, got north of Woodward on OK-34 and turned east onto back roads to cut over to OK-50.  Back roads turned to dirt, and dirt turned to sand, but Tim managed to keep the car both on the road and on pace with the storm.

   OK-50 took us north to the Cimarron River at Freedom, OK.  Coming across the river and into town, a long, skinny funnel may have touched down briefly north of town.  This storm remained tornado-warned as we turned east on US-64 toward Alva to follow it.  We saw several rotating wall clouds and lowerings on the road to Alva, stopping to watch twice, but the storm was moving off to our north and was not producing at the time.  Confident that we could catch another tornadic storm by staying south, we let the first storm go and dropped from Alva southwest to the outskirts of Waynoka on US-281.  A Woodward radio station was giving the play-by-play account of the new tornado-warned supercell approaching Waynoka, and we watched from a hill east of town as it tried and failed to drop a tornado.  There may have been a rain-wrapped twister in there somewhere, but at that distance we couldn't say.

   Our mistake came here.  None of us could get radar on our cell phones (we're just college students, no satellite connections or anything) so we were unaware of the strengthening supercell catching up to that one from the southwest.  To stay with that storm, we rushed into Waynoka--where there was a rattlesnake festival going on and thousands of people had had to take shelter in town--and north from there on OK-14. We went through heavy precip, but managed to avoid hail.  On 14 we found cell service somehow, and realized the southern supercell was the only reasonable choice.  Turning east on 64 toward Alva once again, we drove through more intense rain and gusty winds as the northern storm sucked in precip-laden outflow from the strengthening southern one.  Tornadoes were being confirmed on our new target as we made a quick gas stop in Alva, then headed east on US-64 and south on 8 to intercept at Cherokee.

   Driving through Cherokee was a surreal experience.  We were seriously concerned that this town full of mobile homes and other tiny houses could take a direct hit.  The sky was orange in the west as we rolled through the heart of the town, Addison hanging out the window of the lead car yelling at residents to take cover.  Most continued to gawk on the sidewalk, even those in front of a trailer park.  Tornado sirens sounded just before we made it out of town and into the chaser convergence just to the south.

  We pulled off the wide shoulder of OK-8 there, at the end of a long, long line of chase vehicles.  A well-defined lowering, clearly rotating, came into view over an open field to our west just as we climbed out of the car and set up.  The show began immediately, as a funnel emerged, flirted with the ground for a few seconds, then touched down definitively.

   The first tornado dissipated, although it's entirely possible a circulation remained on the ground until the next touchdown moments later.  This new tornado quickly took on a mature stovepipe shape.

   As if this spectacular tornado wasn't thrilling enough to the chasers lining the roadway, a second funnel dropped, pencil-thin at first.  Twins!  It intensified as the first one began to fade and slowly rope out.  The latest tornado appeared to pose a threat to Cherokee, and chasers waited to see whether help would be needed in town.  Thankfully, the tornado passed northwest of most of the town, knocking out power and reportedly destroying a barn (we saw something lofted, probably the barn roof) but doing little else.

  By the time we headed back north through town, we had seen the entire life cycles of three tornadoes from one location.  This storm went on to produce several large, likely violent tornadoes after dark on its way to southern sections of Wichita, where significant damage was reported.  We left the storm at the intersection of OK-8 and US-64 north of Cherokee and headed home for the night.  About the time we returned to Norman, a tornado slammed parts of Woodward, killing at least 5 and changing the face of the outbreak.  Sirens reportedly did not sound, maybe due to the storm itself.  The daytime chase was exhilarating but for the second straight April 14th, the event will be remembered for a tragedy in a small Oklahoma town.  Thoughts and prayers are with Woodward residents today.

February appetizers for spring

   Although there's been no sign of anything like the blizzard that ushered in February 2011, this month has been eventful enough to tease chasers all over Oklahoma with the prospect of an active spring.  A poor chase day on the 3rd led me all the way to Fort Worth--we didn't chase that far, but we were close enough that I was told I had to try In-N-Out for the first time.  Totally worth it.  Thanks to Branden for driving and Sydney for introducing me to animal-style fries.  As far as the storms, we closed in on what looked like it would be a discrete, long-lived supercell in far N TX just as it began lining out like all the other storms in this low-CAPE environment.  Here's some of what we saw:

Supercell from north of Bowie, TX:

Other side of the storm:

Outflow boundary on the west side of Bowie:

Linear storms approaching Bowie:

Updraft trying to strengthen along the squall line, near Chico, TX:

   That about does it for that day.  On the night of the 12th into the morning of the 13th, Norman picked up about 2" of snow.  The lack of moisture near the surface prevented higher snowfall totals but also allowed the surface to cool enough, via the wet-bulb effect, for snow to accumulate.  Though all the snow was gone within 24 hours, roads were dangerous overnight.  A couple shots from OU:

  On the 20th, central OK through S KS was impacted by a round of marginally severe thunderstorms associated with a low up in KS.  Cold-core action around Wichita was limited, but a nice cell managed to get going from OKC to points just northeast.  We caught it as it passed over the city, produced a downburst (Mesonet in W OKC recorded 69 mph gust), and began looking like a solid supercell as it lost us in city traffic.  Tim, who was driving, managed to keep it in view until the far eastern suburbs.

Rainbow over Devon Tower:

Downburst over downtown:

Wall cloud (?) high over OKC.  This should give you an idea of what it's like chasing in a metro area.

  Sadly, one woman was killed in Ada when straight-line winds destroyed a mobile home on this day.