Last Tuesday, I drove to Oklahoma with thoughts of wedges in my mind. I left Peoria, IL at midnight giving me plenty of time to get to my initial target south of Wichita, KS as this would be a high-risk day. During the day, I repositioned further and further south to tap instability ending up in Oklahoma near Enid, OK. This area and much of the high-risk area was prime for tornadic supercells characterized by over 3,000J/kg of CAPE, 0-6km shear at 50kts, and a very moist boundary-layer. It quickly became apparent that an approaching shortwave trough and dry line would easily provide enough lift to spark discrete supercells. Storms fired shortly after 3:00pm and I found myself racing southwest once again just a little too far behind for some odd reason. I managed to find the "first" supercell near Fairview, OK, but along the way internet-data problems really hurt my ability to chase effectively. I later found out once my internet came back online in this sparse area that I had just missed a tornado to my southwest maybe by 15 minutes...One of those cmon' man moments! This supercell was HP-ish and was very hard to observe any rotation...heck I didn't even snap a photo it was that ugly. I later retreat east hoping to catch a new supercell to its south which ended up being the "play" of the day outside Oklahoma City, OK as that supercell produced a long-lived rain-wrapped wedge along I-40. I eventually catch the tail-end of that supercell's life-cycle before reorganizing later to the east near Guthrie, OK, but once again rain-wrapped and hard to see off I-35. This was probably the most frustrating chase I've ever taken part in which made me think of retiring as a storm chaser...well only for a brief second or two. After getting past my disappointing attitude I made the decision to call it a chase and called it a night near Kansas City, MO where I ran into some picturesque mammatus near Emporia, KS. The photo actually kind of showed my sentiment of the chase day with mammatus with a blue-ish tint which echoed my "chase blues". Just two photos from a high risk...ya I know it was one of those kind of days...
a horrific chase day for myself...
That's all for this post since this was one of those chases I'd like to forget, but here are the storm reports from the day illustrating a tornado outbreak did occur seen here. The next day would be an opportunity for redemption...
