Late week Ohio Valley/Mid-Atlantic snowstorm

Thursday update:

Water vapor imagery shows the upper trough digging into the south-central U.S.

Winter storm warnings cover 52 of West Virginia's 55 counties (tip of Northern Panhandle excluded).  Major models have converged.  There's fairly high confidence in enough snow to make road travel extremely difficult or impossible and cause power outages.  Exact snowfall totals only matter so much beyond the point where everything shuts down, and much of the state can expect to reach that point.

The NAM has sharpened the temperature gradient at 700 mb (about 3 km above ground), focusing warm advection into a narrower band.  If this verifies, areas under that band of enhanced ascent will see snowfall rates pushing 2" per hour for several hours Friday night.  Plows and salt can't keep up with that.


Wednesday morning update:

Snow lovers rejoice!

NWS Charleston has covered all but the southernmost areas with a winter storm watch for 6"+ in the lower elevations and 12"+ in the mountains.  These are conservative, no-hype numbers.

Models are converging on the Euro's original idea of the surface low's track.  A more southerly track will mean less of a chance for other precip types to mix in.  There might still be brief intervals of sleet in southern WV, but the greatest ice accumulation should remain well south of the state.  This track brings ever so slightly colder air, such that a terrain-induced warm wedge west of the high elevations is less likely to take a big bite out of accumulations.  Furthermore, the track of the second surface cyclone up the Atlantic coast--the nor'easter--puts WV in a good place to catch wraparound snow on the back side all day Saturday.

Let's look at Weather Prediction Center probabilities...

I-64 corridor from Huntington to Charleston, that's a 50/50 shot at reaching a foot.



Original Tuesday morning post:

Take-home points:

1. Enough snowfall to make travel extremely difficult or impossible across most of West Virginia is looking more and more likely.  Forecast models are trending toward a storm comparable to the major snows of last winter.  Be prepared by Thursday evening.

2. Take forecasts of enormous snow totals with a grain of salt for the next 24 hours.  The big numbers being spewed out by some models are entirely possible, but there are a couple different ways the storm could realistically fail to produce accumulating snow for some of WV.

3. A relatively small swath of western/southwestern/central WV may see some ice accumulation.  A few power outages could result.

For specific point forecasts, NWS Charleston is here: http://www.weather.gov/rlx/.

Details:

West Virginia, the hype is more or less real.  Major models agree that heavy snow is likely for most of the state between Thursday night and Saturday morning.

However, we're 3-4 days out.  Forecasting a fast-moving, amplifying wave at this range relies almost exclusively on numerical models.  The upper wave responsible for the storm?  Still off the West Coast, where weather balloons can't sample it and we're dependent on satellite data.

Upper wave over the Pacific that becomes eastern U.S. snowstorm in major models

One reason I'm not comfortable promising a huge snowfall for WV at this point is the likelihood of downslope warming west of the mountains.  Depending on the track of the surface low--which major models do not have pegged, by the way, with the European going down into Alabama, the GFS in Tennessee, and the NAM in Kentucky--winds will be more or less out of the east in the WV mountains.  Air descending the western slopes to higher pressure levels will warm somewhat.  Both NAM and GFS bring surface temperatures in the lower elevations to about 33 F during the day Friday, potentially knocking down accumulations.  Good news for snow lovers is that it's brutally cold across WV right now.  Most areas brought to the melting point by downsloping on Friday would be reaching that point for the first time all week.  The ground will still be quite cold.

Another way for the snowstorm to flop is for a large part of the precip to fall as freezing rain and/or sleet.

Refresher on the difference between freezing rain and sleet, courtesy NWS

NAM and other SREF members are strongly suggesting a short period of moderate to heavy freezing rain in western WV sometime early Friday.  Accurately predicting precip type requires nailing down the vertical profile of temperature in the atmosphere.  One degree in a given layer can be the difference between a crippling snowfall and an inch of sleet.  So at this range, with the wave still offshore, it's a crapshoot.  The point is that if a lot of the precip falls as freezing rain and/or sleet, snow totals will be minimized.  Also know that significant ice accumulation from freezing rain can lead to power outages, so prepare for that possibility.

Heroin and earthquakes

I grew up in the unincorporated community of Scott Depot, West Virginia, about halfway between Huntington and Charleston.  When I was there at Christmas, I went in the Sheetz gas station that was built after we got our own I-64 exit.  I opened the door to the bathroom stall on the right, looked down, and saw an empty Arnold Palmer can with the bottom sliced off.  The bottom of the can lay next to it with a burned circle and some brownish residue in the middle.  A trace of the same residue was on top of the toilet paper dispenser.  So I went in the other stall.  While I was there, a boy of maybe five or six walked into the one I had just left.  I could see the can on the floor and didn't take my eyes off it until he stepped out.

Scott Depot was an easy and safe place to grow up. My kindergarten class took walking field trips.  Scott Teays Elementary was one of the best schools in the state; that's not what I heard on this trip back.  The playground, a hundred feet from the main road through town, wasn't fenced; it is now.  My friends and I slept outside in tents at least one night every summer.  We prowled around neighbors' yards clothed in all black while playing spotlight.  We walked and biked through the "worst" neighborhoods in town unsupervised and unconcerned.  So did my future wife and her girlfriends, at thirteen.  The most serious danger to us was definitely us.

Heroin was some exotic scourge like Ebola that we only learned about in health class.  None of us ever imagined encountering it half a mile down the road.  The most substance abuse we ever saw was the Mountain Dew bottles full of tobacco spit skittering around the school bus floor--at least until the day, not long before I left for OU, that kids on our street saw something taken from a neighbor's crawl space and cash left in its place.

Scott Depot is only on the fringe of the crisis.  It's still a safe place on the whole.  Heroin turning up there is like debris falling miles from a tornado:  You might be okay for the moment, but someplace nearby is being ravaged.  There are plenty of articles about the painkiller and heroin epidemics around the Appalachian coalfields.  I'm not going to copy and paste them all.  The one that prompted this post is here:

Major Drug Roundup near Oceana Leads to 49 Arrests

You might brush off that headline.  Drug crackdowns happen across the United States every day.  But Wyoming County had a population of 22,598 in 2014.  All of those arrested were dealers, not merely users, and sold to undercover officers.  They weren't selling weed; they were selling things that kill.  And they were all busted between 7 a.m. and noon on Wednesday.

0.22 percent of Wyoming County was arrested for dealing painkillers and heroin in five hours.

Suppose each dealer has 10 regular customers.  Suppose this sweep nabbed half the pushers in the county.  Then 4.4 percent of the county would be using; with an average household size of 2.45 people, the expected number of Wyoming County doors on which you'd need to knock to find an addict would be 10.

I have no idea how this can be fixed.  Though nobody can accuse President Obama and his EPA of helping the situation, coal jobs were vanishing anyway.  Appalachia doesn't have a drug crisis because coal is going away.  It has a drug crisis because coal going away doesn't leave much.  Forbes ranks West Virginia as the worst state in which to do business, primarily because it has the lowest college attainment rate and is the only state steadily losing population, but also because of its bottom-ranked regulatory environment.  (Apparently the state government imposes a heavier regulatory burden on businesses than any other, but still couldn't keep one from spilling a whole tank of chemicals directly into the capital city's water supply.)  It's easy to say, "Finish college and elect better leaders."  Getting it done is clearly a different matter.  The state has spent an incomprehensible sum on the in-state Promise scholarship.  Voters got frustrated with Democrats and gave the state legislature to Republicans.  It hasn't been very long, but so far, no dice.

I shouldn't have been so surprised.  It just makes me sad.  On a hill that sits back from Teays Valley Road, there's a subdivision where I hung out with a kindergarten friend who'd be the best man in my wedding.  Between that and the roadway, there's an assisted living home where my grandma lived for years.  Across a little field from that, there's a local hardware store that put my name on its marquee when I went to the spelling bee.  And right on the other side of Teays Valley Road, the day after Christmas, somebody walked into the gas station, slipped a can of tea and lemonade under his jacket, went into the bathroom, drained the can, cut off the bottom, placed some heroin in the center, held a lighter under the metal until the drug melted, sucked it up with a syringe, and jabbed it into a vein.  He stumbled out alive, this time.  Maybe we passed in the store.  I walked in.  So did that boy, whose childhood West Virginia has darker corners than mine ever did.

____________

Oil and gas are to Oklahoma what coal once was to West Virginia.  The night after the Wyoming County drug sweep, a series of ~4.0 earthquakes occurred in northwestern Oklahoma.  Minor, mostly imperceptible quakes jumped off the charts here right around the time injection wells for waste water from fracking became widespread.  The correlation or amazing coincidence, depending on whom you ask, is a point of bitter contention among academics, energy companies, and residents.

I'll take the earthquakes.

Tornadoes and vehicles

The death toll from the December 26 tornado event in the DFW metroplex stands at 11.  All eight victims in the Garland area, near the President George Bush Turnpike and Interstate 30, were caught in their vehicles.

This tragedy should not surprise anyone familiar with past killer tornadoes.  Just in Oklahoma and bordering towns:

5/1/1954, Cotton County:  Two killed trying to escape a tornado in a pickup
7/15/1955, Sulphur:  One killed, two injured in a car at a drive-in
4/2/1957, Murray County:  Truck thrown from Route 77; driver killed
4/2/1957, Marshall County:  Car thrown over 200 yards; one killed, one injured
5/5/1960, McIntosh County:  Two killed, five injured; caught while driving to neighbor's cellar
5/5/1960, near Fort Smith, AR:  Transport truck lofted from Route 64; driver killed
5/26/1973, Muskogee County:  Truck thrown/rolled half a mile; four killed
4/10/1979, Wichita Falls, TX:  25 vehicle-related fatalities in F4 tornado; only five in homes
5/15/1990, Stillwater:  One killed while driving to shelter at friend's house
4/26/1991, Pawnee County:  Cars blown from Cimarron Turnpike; one killed
4/26/1991, Copan:  Car thrown 250 yards; one killed, one injured
5/3/1999, OKC metro:  Two killed, many injured at highway overpasses
5/3/1999, Payne County:  Car lofted from beneath I-35 overpass; driver killed
5/10/2008, far SW Missouri:  Multiple vehicle fatalities from Picher, OK tornado
2/10/2009, Carter County:  Driver of truck on I-35 killed by Lone Grove tornado
5/10/2010, Moore/OKC:  One killed trying to escape Lake Draper tornado
5/24/2011, Calumet:  Three killed on I-40 by EF5 El Reno/Piedmont tornado
5/19/2013, near Shawnee:  One killed in vehicle
5/31/2013, near El Reno:  All eight tornado victims were in vehicles

Encounters between drivers and tornadoes seem to fall into two categories:

1.  Locals trying to evacuate or reach safe shelter by car

This is a pure social science problem.  There is a dangerous myth that some tornadoes are so strong as to be unsurvivable above ground.  In reality, in the May 3, 1999 Bridge Creek-Moore-OKC tornado, 99% of people in homes sustaining F4 or F5 damage survived (Hammer and Schmidlin 2002).  Mobile Doppler radar observed an unimaginably violent 318 mph peak wind speed in that tornado.  While not all houses receiving high-end damage experienced winds quite that extreme, it's fair to conclude that if the May 3 tornado was easily survivable above ground, any tornado is.

Let me say that again, because it's important:  In one of the most intense and destructive tornadoes ever seen, 99% of people sheltering in the hardest-hit houses survived.  If a tornado is headed your way, the odds are against it being an EF5.  Even if it is, most of its track will not experience the peak EF4-5 winds--the odds are still against your house sustaining EF4-5 damage.  So if you're following appropriate tornado safety guidelines in a reasonably well-built home, you have reason to believe your chances of riding out an approaching tornado above ground are actually much better than that 99%.

That's not to say that nobody should drive to safer shelter.  Not everyone is in a well-built house, office, or large public building.  Mobile home residents, people working in areas without sturdy buildings (like oilfields), and others may have no choice.  As the following graphic from NWS Norman stresses, it's critical for people in such situations to closely monitor weather information and put their plans into action before a tornado warning is in effect at their location.  Lead time with a tornado warning is typically 20 minutes or less.  That's too late to take to the road. 

2.  Motorists unaware of the danger

This describes a couple of the El Reno fatalities in 2013, and probably at least some of those in Garland.  Anyone who's driven around the DFW metroplex can attest that trips often take much longer than the time scale of a tornado warning.  The area is a perpetual traffic jam even in fair weather.  Highway signs with up-to-the-minute messages can be of some use in alerting drivers to the existence of the threat, but can't convey details or maps.  Even if drivers receive a tornado warning, around population centers it may be impossible to get them all off the road and into sturdy shelter in a matter of minutes.  Being on a bumper-to-bumper highway when a warning is issued is a worst-case scenario.  Making sure it doesn't happen calls for weather awareness well before the warning.

For both categories, the underlying issue is that many people don't act until they become aware of a tornado warning for their location.

Surviving a severe weather event begins long before a warning comes out.  There are a number of products issued by the NWS, like convective outlooks and tornado watches, that provide severe weather awareness days to hours in advance.  These products can't pinpoint locations down to the town and times down to the minute.  What they can do is help people in the risk area avoid desperate situations.  As long as occupied vehicles are being lofted by tornadoes, those products aren't achieving their goal.

A tornado watch means that the broader environment will be favorable for tornadoes over the coming hours.  It's your cue to make sure you can quickly receive warnings and seek shelter if need be.  A tornado warning means that a specific storm moving into your specific location either is producing a confirmed tornado or has a radar signature that strongly suggests one.  A warning doesn't mean "Drive to a place where you can seek shelter."  It means "Shelter right now!"  In the current state of the science, there is no official product between the watch, which has a lead time of hours, and the warning, which has a lead time of minutes.  That means that when you're in a watch box, you never want to be without means of receiving tornado warnings instantly, or more than a few minutes from some kind of shelter.  Being on the road makes it harder to get warnings and other information, harder to be sure exactly where you are in relation to the threat, and harder to get to safe shelter quickly.

16 November 2015 Panhandle tornadoes

Addison and I loaded up and departed immediately after class.  Norman was cold, overcast, and misty.  We had been considering a target of Childress, TX, earlier in the morning, but were both leaning toward playing farther north along the I-40 corridor as the theta-e axis nosed northward.  We agreed on a target of Groom, TX, as we left the National Weather Center.  Convection struggled to become established in the modest instability and strong shear typical of late fall Plains events, giving us time to reach the Panhandle.

Near the western Oklahoma border, we broke out of a thick deck of low stratocumulus and the temperature jumped.  We arrived at the interchange where Hwy 70 goes south to Clarendon and surveyed some high-based thunderstorms that for some reason were barely clinging to life.  It could have been that the strong heating west of the cloud deck had mixed out too much low-level moisture, but we weren't sure.  Regardless, a supercell had formed between Amarillo and Lubbock, and it was becoming clear from radar data that that storm was our only chance of seeing anything worthwhile before dark.

The Texas Panhandle is not the iron-flat, grid-road holy land of storm chasing I once thought it was.  That does exist on the Llano Estacado, the high plain west of the Caprock Escarpment.  But the eastern half of the Panhandle is dominated by river valleys--the Canadian and the forks of the Red--all of them extensive obstacles for chasers.  We found ourselves stuck southwest of Clarendon on the rim of a wide, shallow valley where the Prairie Dog Town Fork and its tributaries flow (at least when it rains).  The supercell churned behind the opposite rim of the valley, maybe 20 miles distant.  As the sun sank along the storm's southern flank, it provided adequate contrast for us to see a rain-free base with fingers of cloud reaching down, moving around, and changing shape.  At such a distance we could only speculate about what we were seeing.

Desperate to intercept somewhere before nightfall, we backtracked to Clarendon and headed northwest on U.S. 287, a wide open stretch of highway with which we'd become familiar on a PECAN deployment in the summer.  With the storm moving northeast, we pushed on until we approached the forward flank.  A funnel appeared in front of us and reached toward the ground; by the time we pulled over, it had almost retreated back to the cloud base.  Other chasers confirmed a brief tornado.

We stopped just short of the RFD gust front at Goodnight (where Charles Goodnight of the Goodnight-Loving Trail is buried) and observed for a few minutes before turning north on Ranch Road 294.  The outflow was bearing down from the west, a second storm was forming behind ours, and darkness was gathering.  By lightning we saw things beginning to happen far to our north-northeast and pulled over.  The first photo had to be brightened a lot and shows a pronounced clear slot wrapping around the incipient funnel cloud.  Rain and wind slammed us while we tried to document the tornado.  It's not visible in my photos, but we saw a debris cloud at the surface backlit by lightning.  Addison called it in to NWS Amarillo.  This tornado was very close to Groom, the target we had set in Norman and the site of my 16 April tornado intercept.

This tornado dissipated and we continued north to I-40, on which we headed east.  The supercell was gaining forward speed and we weren't sure how long we could stay with it, or if we'd be able to intercept again at all.  But as we went east through Groom and Alanreed, lightning allowed us to view another tornado maturing to our north.  It grew from a cone into a stovepipe and persisted until it moved out of view.  Addison called AMA again.  We didn't take photos, since there were few stopping places on I-40 and we hoped to catch the storm again.  Watching radar, we continued to eye a second storm right on the heels of the first.

We turned north at McLean, TX, on Hwy 273.  The first part of this highway was straight and desolate.  This was the little Pontiac's first storm chase, and it got to stretch its legs with storms racing away from us at 50+ mph.  We caught a break, though:  the second storm organized quickly and produced a tornado.  The velocity signature wasn't immediately obvious as it was passing near a wind farm, but one scan showed a long faint hook in reflectivity and the next showed a high-reflectivity ball at the end of it.  We decided to let the lead storm go, even though the tornado we'd seen from I-40 was now a monster near Pampa, and play the closer one.

The road turned northwest toward Lefors and Pampa.  Coming over a rise, we saw the wedge on the lead storm far to our north.  By the time we got out and took photos, it had all but disappeared over the horizon, but at least the top of a big tornado is evident.

There was a single power flash to our west with the new tornado as we flew northwestward.  Where 17 Road meets Hwy 273 just north of Lefors, we got our best look at Pampa tornado #2 as it moved along the southern fringes of Pampa about eight miles to our northwest, doing EF-3 damage.  Rapid rising motion along the edges of the condensation funnel was visible even by lightning.  It was the strongest tornado either of us had seen in person to date, with peak winds estimated at 155 mph and a maximum width of 750 yards.  AMA got a third phone call and a tweet, but everyone in the Panhandle knew what was going on by that time.

We decided the storm, which was still blasting northeastward at highway speeds, was worth following farther into the night.  Getting to the southwest-northeast U.S. 60 would offer us a chance to stay with it.  The northward jog on the gravel 17 Road was hairy at times.  The remote farmland was extremely dark, and sharp curves caught me by surprise.  We were lucky to stay on the road.  Driving on unfamiliar roads in a hurry, distracted, and/or at night is a greater danger than the storms, especially for conservative chasers.  After thumping over several cattle guards, we emerged on Hwy 152 and cut over to U.S. 60 east of Pampa.

At this point we became concerned.  Emergency vehicles with lights flashing were hurrying back and forth.  It was evident that significant damage had occurred somewhere.  We later learned that the tornado had destroyed a Halliburton plant less than five miles west of the intersection.  Just after turning northeast on U.S. 60, all at once we noticed power lines lying on the road, a defoliated tree, and the pungent smell of freshly ripped grass.  In hindsight, this was likely the track of the first Pampa-area tornado, not the second.  Seeing no structures in the area where our help might be needed, we continued behind the storm.  Lightning periodically showed us a large tornado; a damage survey would conclude that the Pampa tornado had actually dissipated and we were following a new one.

We stopped somewhere near Miami for a final view.  Far off on the horizon, there appeared to be two tornadoes side by side.

The town of Canadian, farther northeast on U.S. 60, marked the end of the chase.  We were running low on gas and unable to make out any more interesting features on the storm.  We dropped south to get gas and snacks in Wheeler, then raced through Shamrock to I-40 as a congealing QLCS spun up weak mesovortices all around us.  Even with a speed limit of 75 in the Panhandle, not until the Oklahoma border was there a comfortable cushion between us and the leading edge.

Per NWS Amarillo's final public information statement on the event, nobody was injured in these tornadoes, even though two EF-3s brushed Pampa.  Photographically it was a rough night, but it's impossible to complain about catching nocturnal wedges in November.  No tornadoes as strong as these had ever been recorded so far west and so late in the year.  Five or six tornadoes in a day is also a personal best.

 

To the best of our knowledge, we at least saw tornadoes 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 on this map.  It's possible that 6 and 17 were the "twins" we observed from near Miami.

16 April 2015 Panhandle chase

I got a late start out of Norman at noon.  Usually that would be okay for a chase in the central and eastern Texas Panhandle, but a fairly deep layer of backed low-level winds meant (a) no EML and (b) upslope up the Caprock.  Storms were well underway when I got off I-40 around Groom and started edging westward toward an intense area of convection near Panhandle.  It looked like it might propagate ahead of the outflow boundary lying just east of most of the ongoing storms.  Before long there was a persistent dust whirl to the southwest where a developing mesocyclone should have been.  I wasn't comfortable calling it a tornado on the visual appearance alone, but its position relative to the storm and Twitter reports from closer chasers suggested it was a weak tornado.

The road network and terrain just east of Amarillo were outstanding for chasing during this storm's early life.  I hung back east of the storm as it struggled to clear the outflow boundary laid down by extensive mid-afternoon convection.

Multiple small areas of tight rotation came and went as the storm overtook the boundary.  One was visually striking, with wisps of cloud curling into it.

After further failed attempts and several convincing tornado lookalikes, low-level rotation became focused just north of the dirt road I'd been following eastward for miles.  That road was ending and I was going to have to take my south escape (Hwy 70) to I-40.  Had the storm waited another few minutes, I would have been gone, but it produced a small dusty tornado not far to my northwest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A line of gustnadoes appeared along the gust front to the south and southwest.

Through roads to the east suddenly disappeared, leaving I-40 (well south of the storm) as the only option for repositioning.  Meanwhile, the supercell took on an HP mode.

The next stop was FM 291.  I didn't venture far northward on it, only far enough to get a view of the mammatus to the north and some typical HP structure.  Velocity signatures were only growing more impressive on what was now the dominant storm, but there was no point trying to intercept tornadoes so completely wrapped in rain and hail.

Then it was back east on I-40 to Hwy 273 and northward to W Road.

I took dirt roads eastward to FM 1443.  Again I pushed north to see all I could see of the inflow/updraft area; there were some lowerings, but surging rain and hail forced me to bail southward quickly.

I gained some space by going east as far as Shamrock and coming up Route 83 in front of the storm, which was still showing strong rotation.  A hill just west of the intersection of 83 and FM 1906 offered the only good viewing south of Wheeler.  Despite very impressive velocity signatures (and at one point even a correlation coefficient minimum suggestive of lofted debris) immediately to the west, nothing definitive could be made out in the precip.  The bear's cage was visually obvious as the entire east side of the storm rotated around it; how much of it was actually tornado is anybody's guess.

I navigated eastward and northward on back roads, barely making it through a low spot where rain had fallen from a nearby storm, and saw a brief funnel near Kelton on Hwy 152.

That should have been the end of the chase day, but after a pit stop in Sayre back on the Oklahoma side, two circulations moving toward Cheyenne were too strong and too close to ignore.  I did a bit of spotting by lightning on Route 283 south of town.  Each mesocyclone had a wall cloud or lowering associated with it, but surface temperatures were just a little too cool for tornadoes at this point.

12 hours and 45 minutes on the road, a small tornado or possibly two, and one beast of a supercell.  In yet another slow tornado year, today was a good day.

Update:  NWS Amarillo's survey determined the tornado east-northeast of Groom was, not surprisingly, an EF-0 with winds around 70 mph.  Estimated path length was 2.4 miles and estimated width was 30 yards (quite a bit smaller than the initial dust circulation in the photos).  This is a good example of a tornado that probably would never have been recorded two or three decades ago--weak, short-lived, only visible at fairly close range, and occurring in a desolate area.

19 June 2014 lightning show

   The 15th International Conference on Atmospheric Electricity is taking place in Norman this week.  There is also actual lightning.  I left Norman Thursday evening after helping out with the conference and met an ongoing cluster of strong to marginally severe thunderstorms near Binger, OK.  The easternmost cell began propagating slowly eastward, developing a couple transient areas of low-level rotation and producing quite a bit of CG lightning.  I set up just off Route 81 south of El Reno as the sun finally dropped far enough to allow lightning shots.  Outflow winds sustained at 40+ mph made it nearly impossible to keep the camera steady on the tripod.

At least one flash connected with the ground between me and the horizon:

I missed quite a few close CGs.  The storms slowly began to slide east and with several flashes reaching ground less than a mile away, it was time to reposition east down Reno.

   I dropped south and east into Mustang, then headed for the hill on Highway 9 west of Norman.  The storms had almost stalled again and were too far away.  After some maneuvering around Blanchard, I gave up and made for the OU parking garage.  There wasn't much to the storms at that point, but a small cell to the west fought off nocturnal cooling long enough to spit out several more CGs.