May 24th, 2011, Canton, OK Tornadic Supercell
A High Risk day in Central Oklahoma! Usually just the kind of setup that yields
hordes of chasers and traffic jams on the Plains! We had spent the night in
Oklahoma City, so we were in no particular hurry to go anywhere. There were two
clear plays for the day: Play the outflow boundary up in Kansas, or the dry line
in Oklahoma. We elected to go with the dry line play expecting more discrete
supercells at the dry line than there would be in Kansas.
After waiting around the hotel until about 11, we headed down I-40 west to
Weatherford, watching as storms fired in Kansas but resisting the temptation to
go charging north. Once in Weatherford, we stopped for lunch and waited some
more, until about 3 o’clock when the dry line exploded with a line of supercells:
a “string of pearls” as Roger likes to call it. We headed north out of town to
intercept our target storm, getting up to the nice supercell between Thomas and
Putnam. As we got to the storm, it was clearly not yet ready to do its thing
yet, having a broad, flat base but not much of a wall cloud. We watched for a
bit and then the cell started to get away from us and we headed northeast after
it. Once we got to Eagle City the storm had matured and was now ready for
business. We watched as it produced a brief multi-vortex tornado north of that
town that quickly dissipated. We chased the storm north again and just as we got
to Canton the storm produced for us a whole menu of tornado types. First, a
beautifully backlit Wizard of Oz-like tornado, which then grew into a big stove
pipe as it passed to the north of the town, then an even bigger cone, then
wedged out as it headed off to the northeast, all tremendously photogenic. We
were able to get through town quickly and got on a northeast road that let us
drive more or less right alongside the now huge but mostly rain-wrapped wedge.
We chased it past Longdale and all the way to near Fairview before it finally
roped out, but as it did, the meso jumped and a white elephant trunk formed on
the right side of the road in front of us while the original tornado died on the
left side. We headed north then east out of Fairview, where the storm produced a
long ropey tornado north of us near Isabella, the 4th tornado of the storm. Once
that tornado finally died, we drove alongside the white-lit updraft, a fantastic
corkscrew that I was able to get a couple of nice shots of even though I was
driving.
The storm finally weakened and was getting away from us, but it was only 5 PM,
so there was plenty of chase time left! The next two storms to our south were
both producing big, dangerous tornadoes, one of which was to pass through
Piedmont on the northwest side of OKC and the other through Norman on the south
side. We decided to try and intercept the Norman storm but to do so we needed to
get around the northern storm and in front of the southern one: A trek of about
150 miles! We blasted east out of O’Keene all the way to Stillwater, just as the
northern storm was about to hit Guthrie not far to our southwest. We then turned
south and plunged towards the interstate, then passed it and went all the way to
Tecumseh in order to be sure that we were clear of the big hook that had been
housing a large tornado for hours. We charged back north of the interstate and
there it was backlit in orange, a large stovepipe to our northwest. We headed
west towards McLoud and as we popped out of the trees, the tornado was just to
our south-southwest roping out! As the tornado disappeared, it quickly became
clear that the rotation was going to pass almost right over us, so we rushed
back east and then south, and as the meso passed directly above us several
people in the van complained of popping ears and you could actually smell the
remnants of the long-track tornado: a burning, moldy, “funky” smell.
We hopped on I-40 and headed east, trying to stay in front of the next storm in
the line and ended up in a big rain core, finally getting off in Cromwell and
heading north. We headed north of the interstate and got under the ugly black
base of the storm, but it didn’t look like it was going to do much. Then we got
into one of those situations where every time we wanted to give up on the storm
it showed a little more. We chased the storm northeast for about an hour through
winding, wooded roads, around Lake Okmulgee and into the city of Okmulgee
itself. The storm was now far out of reach to the north, but we were fairly
certain we observed a couple of power flashes, which seemed to be confirmed by
later spotter reports as a tornado.
After dinner, we headed for the hotel in Ft. Smith, AR, but the day was still
not over. By now, there was a raging squall line in front of us and several very
nasty looking tornado warned supercells to the south that were going to arrive
in Ft. Smith about the same time as us! The closest of the supercells had about
the nastiest looking radar return I can remember. As we plowed through the
squall line seemingly forever, several of the guests, clearly still a little
spooked about Joplin 2 days earlier, were seeing lowerings in the lightning
flashes and worrying that there was a tornado but they were generally just
seeing cloud debris around the shelf cloud in front of us.
We beat the storms to Ft. Smith by only minutes, and were still unloading the
vans when the tornado sirens started sounding, frightening the other guests at
the hotel. I planned to get up to my room, setup the radar on my laptop, then go
down and watch the show, but the storm was moving even quicker than we thought!
The first gusts from the violent bow echo hit as I was coming down the stairs,
knocking big limbs off of several of the trees near the hotel, including one
that landed on a truck parked right in front of the lobby. Then, boom, boom,
BOOM! Three transformer explosions and the power was out…. and stayed out the
rest of the night, meaning that there was no breakfast or coffee in the morning,
cold showers only, and with nobody getting any sleep in the warm, muggy rooms
with no AC, we had a bunch of grumpy guests and drivers the next morning. Still,
we were lucky we got hit by the nose of the bow echo and that it had kept the
tornadic supercell to our south, as it produced a deadly tornado that killed 4,
injured 18, and leveled the town of Denning one county east of us.
So, another wild chase day that wasn’t over until well after we thought it was!
The tornado count for the day was five as we can’t count the power flashes off
to the north of Okmulgee. One benefit to chasing the supercell away from OKC was
that chaser convergence really wasn’t that bad.
The mileage actually wasn’t that high for the day, 535 miles but it sure seemed like a LONG day driving the lead van to me!
SSPC
Convective Outlook SPC
Tornado Prob. NOAA Storm Report
All pictures (C) Richard Hamel 2017.