Too late to the action

Chase Recap:

I ended up leaving Norman around 2:45 as I had a doctors appointment and thought I would have enough time to make it south for storms, but it turns out we’d be just a little late. We left Norman and took 44 to 62 to 183. About the time we reached Lawton the news of the car accident in Spur, TX was coming in, and by the time we reached Frederick we were pretty sure of the victims. A huge somber reminder that driving is dangerous, especially while chasing and distracted.

We continued south down 183 thru Vernon and then down to Seymour. The one isolated storm was producing tornadoes near Abilene and north of there, and that was our target storm. As we neared, we found a good Farm to Market road to plan our intercept on. Tornado reports were coming in as well, so we thought for sure we’d score.

We got south of Haskell and took FM618 east and popped out of the precip pretty quickly to see a whales mouth/outflow feature. OK That can’t be, we just saw tornado photos on Facebook.

Unfortunately we were about 5 minutes late and missed the tornadoes.

We continued following the storm north, hoping it would lose its outflow features and wrap back up again. It didn’t until near Seymour, where we got some hail to 2.75″ (baseballs) and managed to crack my windshield more.

We decided, even if it was dark, that we’d run back towards the west to get on a developing storm near Munday, TX. The storm exhibited a huge (2-3 mile wide) wall cloud and seemed like perhaps it’d wrap but, but it never seemed to get it done. Low surface temperatures were likely to blame. We followed this back up to US 82 before heading home for the day.