14 April 1998
A Dark Messy One
Tim had been planning to head north toward Kansas, but as
the day shaped up it looked like southwest was the way to go. A tiny tower
had started to go up in southwest OK by 3:30, just as Tim was leaving Tinker
to pick me up. Five minutes later SPC had issued a tornado watch for most
of central Oklahoma, and there was a severe warning for the "tiny tower"
which had quickly blossomed into an eliptical shaped, isolated blob of
nastiness on the FDR radar image. We left my apartment at about 4:15 CDT
(after I resolved some second thoughts...). The anvil was spread over and
in front of us as we headed out of Norman. We wound up around Blanchard
with the storm west of us (Tim said it was about 15 miles - I can't tell
yet). It was a very dark, messy looking storm with lots of heavy precip.
As we approached the storm, it was moving northeast and started turning
right, shifting its motion more eastwardly. We wound up spending a fair
bit of time trying to get in a good position, and finally let the storm
pass us by to the north a few miles east of Paul's Valley. Up until this
time, I was pretty scared because the shelf cloud and heavy precipitation
looked very ominous, and the storm was moving directly toward us most of
the time (it was always at a safe distance thanks to Tim's expertise, but
I'm simply not used to this yet). The storm was feeding off a large field
of moisture evidenced by stratocumulus flowing into it from the south,
and as we watched it go by it appeared to have some rotation and a bit
of a bell shape, but it never got itself quite organized enough to drop
a funnel while we were on it. It did have an obvious RFD notch, which looked
very cool for a short time as crepuscular rays streamed through it. Also
saw a rainbow, of course, coming out of the core. After we let the storm
go by we headed north and paused to get some shots of the back side of
the tower, which did have a good corkscrew appearance for awhile. There
was a good bit of hail on the ground. About this time the sun went down,
and the storm promptly fell apart. Another one to the west was trying to
get going, but failed miserably. Tim said it was probably because the one
we were on had used up most of the moisture. We drove north some more,
and came upon a rich green field with a layer of white mist over it to
the west, and the magenta sunset behind that. It was a beautiful scene.
We got out to look, and the field was covered with hail, some of which
was still golf ball sized although it had been sitting there melting for
about an hour. After that it was pretty much dark, and since there was
no lightning action we went to "Joe's Famous Pizza" in Purcell to eat.
We got home at 10pm. It wasn't a bad way to spend an afternoon by any means,
but I'm glad we didn't have to drive too far to see this particular storm.
These images are in no particular order and are Copyright 1998 Shannon
Key
Click on an image to enlarge it.
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