LP Supercell near Woodward, OK

Chase Recap:

Eric and I started today where we left off yesterday – in Sallisaw, OK. We headed west on I-40 to Oklahoma City metro area. We stopped near Henryetta when we saw some tornado damage to trees along the interstate. I shot a short video of the damage.

Then we headed further west, stopping again so that I could do a phoner with WLNS TV 6 during the noon news near Okemah. Heading further west we found the damage along I-40 near Shawnee from the big tornado including the Love’s truck stop that was destroyed. They had cleaned things up and reopened the interstate, but there was still damage all over the place.

We headed to Steve Miller OK’s house in Moore to see what the damage did to his house. It was not bad at all, with a small part of the roof damaged, and his front doors and his fence blown over. Scott Bennett and Steve were just returning from their survey of the damage when we arrived.

Scott decided to chase with Eric and I, and we decided to head west. Our initial target was west of Oklahoma City. We headed west to Weatherford, then stopped for some Braums. After looking over some data, we decided to drop south to Carnegie, OK and wait.

We sat around for an hour or so before a storm started blowing up to our west, southwest of New Cordell, OK. We headed north and then west to intercept the cell, getting to New Cordell as they severe warned the storm. We could visually see the storm, and it was looking good. We stopped for gas and some snacks and then got west of New Cordell in a position to intercept, when the anvil became Orphaned and the storm competely died within 30-45 minutes.

We headed up US 183 towards other storms that were building to the north, casually taking our time to get there as they weren’t building in much of a hurry. We pulled over for a bit and recorded a time lapse of the chasers coming up US 183, including the Red Shoe and everyone following him.

We eventually headed to the storms near Vici, and took some back roads to intercept. The TV choppers were out in full force, along with idiot chasers. We were going north on a dirt road and about a 1/2 mile in front of us the discovery crew pulled out in front of us. They continued a mile or two north before stopping suddenly in the middle of the road, and a camera guy jumping out in front of us while we were trying to pass, to get his ‘shot’. I don’t really care what most people do while storm chasing, but this was really stupid, and it wasn’t any storm chasers being stupid – It was the camera guys for the Discovery channel being stupid.

We continued north where we found some decent sized hail stones on the ground (maybe golfball size at the most, mostly 1-1.5″ hail though). We played in those for a bit, and Scott and Eric said they saw a brief funnel, which I missed because I was throwing hailstones at my truck. Typical. 🙂

We zig-zagged through many dirt roads to east of Woodward, where we finally gave up on the storm, heading back to Woodward with David Drummond and eating supper at Braums (again). We headed to Watonga, but the Western Inn was full, so we ended up going to El Reno and staying at the Motel 6.