Five days and nearly 3,000 miles later, I’m back from out west. This storm system proved to be a disappointment, but it did have its moments. Bill Oosterbaan and I intercepted a nice low-topped supercell in northeast Kansas on Wednesday night, and it’s possible that we witnessed a brief tornado. I need to scrutinize the brief footage I got of the storm feature in question. What was unmistakable was the broader circulation of the storm. It seemed weird to be chasing a north-moving storm with inflow from the northeast, but that’s how it was with storms that moved along a warm front–apparently across it–near a low center with a 500 mb closed low in the vicinity.
Yesterday was a more typical setup. We targeted the Muskogee, Oklahoma, area, which the SREF and RUC pointed to as offering the best overlay of instability and mid-level support, with the H5 jet core nosing into the region.
We were right on the first storms as they initiated, but they were feeble things that just couldn’t seem to get their acts together. With a long drive home lying ahead of us, we concluded to start heading north and settle for a nice lightning show on the way home.
But our prospects improved as the 500 mb jet began to strengthen. A couple of cells to our west and northwest intensified and began to take on a telltale appearance on the radar. A handful of scans later, rotation started to manifest on SRV. By this time we were on US 59 north of the Grand Lake of the Cherokee, east of Vinita and directly in the path of the southernmost cell. At a side road, we pulled aside and I tripoded my camcorder and videotaped some nice storm features: pronounced beaver tail, tail cloud, a nasty-looking wall cloud, and a wet RFD notch.
Beginning as a classic supercell, the storm looked for a while like a tornado breeder. But after predictably morphing into an HP, it eventually lined out and got absorbed into the wad of convection springing up to its south. Lack of adequate helicity is probably what kept this and other storms non-tornadic. METARs showed backed surface winds in the vicinity of the storms, but from what I observed, surface inflow was non-existent to weak. Hodograph curvature doesn’t matter much if boundary layer wind speeds are puny.
I have a few photos to process that I’ll slap up in a day or two, possibly along with a radar grab or two. Right now, though, I’ve got some work I need to accomplish before the work week ends, so here’s where I sign off.
