Good day! Today is May 5, and it is the 5th full chase day for Tour 1 (a 10-day tour). I am in Garden City, KS, this morning, and the next few days should be very busy for us. Below is a brief summary of the first half of Tour 1.
April 30, arrival day: the 11 guests and my two drivers, Bob C. and Jennifer D., gathered in Arlington, TX. We did the orientation and motored north to Oklahoma City in order to be well-positioned for Thursday (May 1).
May 1: We spent a lot of time at the library in Blackwell, OK, during the afternoon. Storms developed only 20-30 miles to our east around 4 p.m. We were on the exploding cells early and followed them into southeast Kansas, north of Independence. A cell was tornado-warned for quite a while near Fredonia, but we did not observe a tornado. (There was a report of a brief and weak tornado near Fredonia which we missed, or could not see from our vantage point.) Structure with the storm was good and the guests got a great chase on their first full day. We found food in Neodesha, and drove to Joplin, MO, for the night. A very nice tornado was spawned from a supercell in northeastern Oklahoma, about 80 miles south of our storm, after sunset. That’s the way it goes much of the time in storm chasing.
May 2: We thought we would be able to catch up with the line of strong storms in Central Arkansas on Friday, but they accelerated eastward as we approached Little Rock from the west on I-40. These storms produced a lot of tornadoes in eastern Arkansas, but we were about 50 miles behind them, and they were moving east at 50 mph. We gave up at 2 p.m. in Little Rock. I decided to drop SSW on I-30 into NE TX, but some severe cells in extreme northwest Louisiana caught our attention. We played with these in the trees and had some small hail and lightning. After dinner in Shongaloo, we drove to Shreveport for the night.
May 3: A down day, and we re-positioned westward for the next trough moving into the West. Jennifer gave us a tour of her office — the National Weather Service Office in Fort Worth. We watched the release of the balloon sounding at 6 p.m., and stayed in Cisco for the night.
May 4: We considered chasing storms in extreme West Texas, but thought it would be better to position ourselves in Southwest KS for Monday. We drovenorth from Cisco to Garden City on U.S. 83 all day, with a stop at the lonely Red River bridge between Childress and Hollis. Bob’s minivan was unable to make it all of the way on a horribly sandy road (and the big van almost got stuck, too). We had to push the minivan backward up a little slope to get it out of the sand. Unfortunately, Bob’s group was unable to visit the bridge. We had Chinese dinner in Perryton.
Pictures will be forthcoming…….but maybe not for a while! Wish us luck this week!
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