youtube video of Peidmont supercell
We began this chase day in Breckenridge, TX (following a fun outflow fest the day before from Crowell to Seymour to east of Throckmorton). Target was northwest OK, perhaps as far north as Alva. We only had to go as far as Seiling, as a CB went up just east of town as we approached from the south, around 4:15 p.m. This storm took its time to get strong as others to its north strengthened quickly. Near Okeene, OK, the storm base had a nice rounded look and it threw some hailstones at us. The base was fairly high, but inflow winds from the southeast were steady and rather humid, with dew points in the mid 60s. We watched the nicely sculpted storm base drift from our northwest to northeast some 10 miles or so southeast of Okeene. The base remained high and lowerings were few, but someone driving out of the hail core said that the stones were very large.
About halfway between Okeene and Kingfisher the base started to get a little serious about making a tornado. A lowering persisted as an RFD cut grew.
This was to our NNE, and contrast was deteriorating, so we headed south six miles and then east about ten miles to a hilltop three miles east of Kingfisher. This afforded a great view of the approaching storm base. It looked ready to produce a tornado, but fell just short. The RFD winds that hit us were a little on the cool side, so there may have been issues getting warm inflow all of the way underneath the rotating wall cloud.
We may have been disappointed that the supercell was unable to put a tornado down while we were in perfect position for about 20 minutes, but I doubt that the folks in Kingfisher were.
The cell continued southeast, and we stayed in front of it. We took 33 east of Kingfisher several more miles and dropped south on Reading Road. The structure remained fabulous to our west, and the base was getting lower and lower. Near Piedmont, a ragged and wicked storm base lured us west a mile, but two-inch hail stones had us baling back to our south route. After a few more miles, south of Piedmont now, the storm structure became absolutely insane —- just to our west. The road was on the narrow side and didn’t allow easy turn-offs. We stopped at an intersection, maybe it was W Wilshire Blvd., and I managed to get some wide angle structure shots. Not long thereafter, a moderately fat funnel cloud a few miles to our NNW touched down for a minute or so before getting rain-wrapped. I managed a couple of shots of this tornado, but it was the structure that stole the show. We rode out a storm core south of El Reno after dusk and found rooms in OKC.
Bob says
WOW!!!