April 24:
On the 24th the forecast was pretty tough so I decided to just head west towards Oklahoma City and then hopefully be able to find a more specific target. On the way storms started developing in SW Oklahoma and I decided to go ahead and get on them since it would be later in the afternoon when the real show would possibly happen.
I got to the storms about 1230pm. There seemed to be a embedded supercell trying to organize in the line that had developed. When I got to the storm it wasnt organized at all really but I continued to play around with it. After a while a really nice shelf cloud developed and I stayed in front of it for a while.
After a while I decided to punch into a strong cell to see if there was any hail in there and because I was bored...and there was no hail...and I was still bored.
I waited around near Pauls Valley, OK for a while but it became apparent that storms were more than likely not going to fire later as had been hoped for, so i headed home.
When I
got back into Arkansas I heard of damage not far from my home and
the NWS is reporting it as a tornado and I checked it out before
heading home.
April 25:
More storms developed near/under the upper low and associated cold pool aloft and my wife joined me.
I was in
Van Buren, AR when the first storms started to fire near there.
I chased the first storm that passed near Alma but it never looked very good visually although on radar it didnt look too bad.
I
continued on towards Ozark as several other storms passed behind
us. None of these storms were very organized but there were a bit
better than earlier. When we got to Ozark we saw a new cell
coming up from the southwest and decided to punch into it and see
if there was any hail and there wasnt. When we came back out the
storm was much much better organized (although still crappy) and
so we decided to stick with it. We setup north of Ozark on Hwy
352 (6 miles from home!) and viewed the updraft base.
Within 3
minutes (by camera timestamps) there was a nice lowering and we
observed some obvious rotation.
The wall
cloud continued to develop fairly quickly into a more broad
circulation.
Circulation
intensities weren't close to tornadic but still it was fun. We
let the storm go into the mountains and were home in just a
couple minutes!
This was also my first storm chase for ABC 40/29 in Fort Smith/Fayetteville. They used my pictures for the 5 and 6 and the video for the 10!