This blog consists mainly of weather related posts and recent events in my life. I am a storm chaser for KTUL Channel 8 in Tulsa, OK. I will regularly recap my chase experiences as well as post forecasts from time-to-time.
Since it's late and I haven't had a chance to digest everyplace we were today, I will say that we chased several severe storms and a couple of tornado warned storms in the vicinity of Cordell, OK. We never saw any of these storms drop a tornado despite reports from some chasers of small tornadoes.
I'll try to give a better recap at a later date. I'm off to look at tomorrows setup.
Down at Steve's in Moore. After a few hours at the Sooner Corral we're back at his place forecasting for tomorrow. The setup looks good but the question is whether it will be a night chase or not. We're hoping things will pop just to our WSW around 0z(7:00). Right now it looks like we'll head out to Chickasha in the mid to late afternoon hours and see what happens.
I'm a little more excited about Monday's chase but nonetheless it should be a great two days of chasing.
After the original plan of heading toward Stillwater, we opted to head a little north and intercept our first storm near Ralston, OK. I was able to get some great lightning pics from there. Once the precip hit we headed back down to Pawnee where we let a slightly larger cell run over us.
Once the storm passed over us it appeared the show was over. However, once the storms moved into the Tulsa metro area they began to intensify. We were finally able to get back on the leading edge of the storm in east Tulsa and got ran over by it near 412 and Hwy 88. The storm began to bow out a little at this point and produced very strong winds. I would estimate we saw wind speeds near 60 mph for a couple of minutes.
The first two pictures were taken between Pawnee and Ralston. The video comes from Hwy 412 and Hwy 88 east of Catoosa, OK.
I'm currently on the road to Stillwater for an evening of storm chasing. A line of storms is currently forming west of Enid and moving due east. I am pushing for a play on hwy 60 between Ponca City and Bartlesville but we'll see what happens. More updates later.
While Steve, Matt, Heather, and I were on the lake Saturday we decided we'd go ahead and drive down to Steve's in Moore and chase on Sunday. We left Steve's around 2:30 or so and headed out to Lawton to re-evaluate the situation. After we ate at the worst What-a-burger I've ever been to we decided we'd head north and intercept a line of storms that were moving in. At 4:30 we intercepted a tornado warned supercell west of Carnegie, OK. Soon after nearing that storm we decided to drop South a few miles to intercept the next cell coming in. As we did, this storm went tornado warned as well. This storm is pictured below. We watched this storm make several attempts to get wrapped up but it just couldn't get going. After repositioning on this storm several times we hit the highway back to OKC.
We parallelled the line of storms as we drove up I-44 to the city. Just as we got into the city a cell to our south west went tornado warned near the Oklahoma State Fairgrounds. Instead of rushing back into the metro we pulled into Jones just as they sounded the sirens. After a few minutes the storm weakened and we decided to head up to Hwy 66 and I-44 where we would let the line run over us.
A big thanks to Matt Patterson for driving during this chase. If my estimates are close it was about a 450 mile round trip from Tulsa.
Been a while since I've updated the blog but the season is upon us and things should pick up. Hangin out with Matt, Heather and Steve at skiatook lake today. Feels good to be back on the water.
