We started the day off in the southern portion of the Texas Panhandle and drove all day without much stopping to get back into Oklahoma. We witnessed convective initiation on the southern end of the boundary, just north of Watonga and stayed with this cell all evening long. We made a group decision to stay with it after dark (great bunch of guys!) and we tracked it due south to near Gracemont when we (me included) could hear the rumble of hunger in our bellies over the rumble of thunder (was on the storm for about 3 hours) – so with it getting ever darker and we were growing hungrier, with food options closing, we decided to leave the storm in search of our only meal of the day. Wouldn’t you know it – not 10 minutes after we leave it, it hosed and an F2 tornado struck Anadarko, OK.
The storm was a big High Precipitation mess and it would have been too dark to have witnessed the tornado anyway – but I guess it’s the thought that gets me. Despite this, the night time lightning from this cell was absolutely phenomenal. I’ll post some of those shots at another time.
The storm went through several stages throughout the evening taking on multicellular characteristics and then starting to look a bit more like a real supercell and back to pulse storm, etc… At one point we witnessed a deep lowering rotating wall cloud with good structure from our viewing angle. But, despite the tremendous amount of cascading motion and rotation that we witnessed, not much else happened during daylight hours.
Initial Convection North of Watonga, Oklahoma
The early stages of wall cloud development.
Just north of I-40 over Oklahoma Wind Farm
The base of this storm had a lot of motion in it.
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