May 19, 2001: They Formed Too Damn Early.....

Miles traveled: 470. SPC risk: Slight
Chase partner: Shane Adams.
Nowcasting help thanks to: Tom Pastrano.

We headed straight west down I-40 towards western Oklahoma... the storms apparently didn't want to wait for us. At 1pm or so, a supercell formed on the southern side of an existing area of thunderstorms and produced a weak tornado near Erick. We were 100 miles to the east at the time, and racing toward it, hoping it would hold together until we got there. We finally got into position southwest of Burns Flat, but the storm hadn't held together like we'd hoped. It was assuming a more linear appearance.

We moved a little south, and stopped just off OK 44 south of Burns Flat. By now, it was pretty obvious that the storm was nothing more than a giant gust front with rain and wind.

We then decided to keep heading south. As we drove down OK 44 toward Sentinel, a wallcloud-like lowering developed... well south of the original main core of the storm. It was wrapping rainbands around it, and appeared to produce a brief, but fairly large, funnel cloud.

It quickly disappeared, and we found ourselves in unrelentless heavy rain, which lasted even as we drove west toward Carter and Mangum. Finally the rain let up as we drove south, but just in time for us to get buried in another heavy rain core near Eldorado. We punched out of that core, but by then, the show was over for the day, it seemed. The earlier convection had thrown out an outflow boundary that would surely weaken anything moving over it. Another storm approached from the west, and we intercepted it just west of Quanah, TX. This one, like the other one, was definitely outflow-dominant, but still looked kind of cool anyway.

This storm weakened, and we decided to call it a night (getting one more cool pic of some storm striations near Snyder, OK, the last pic in the series above). As we drove back toward Lawton, we got word of a supercell storm in Archer County, TX. Darkness was coming, so we kept heading home rather than drive away from home to catch a storm that wasn't guaranteed to still be tornadic when we got there. This chase wasn't a total bust though... got to see some neat storm structure.

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