OCTOBER 18th, 2004 NORTHEAST ARKANSAS CHASE
We left Ozark, Arkansas around PM. We set out with the idea of heading east on I-40 for Russellville, Arkansas and then deciding where to go from there. It was very windy and quite warm for this time of year.
We arrived in
Russellville, AR around 1230PM. Along the way we saw several
impressive cumulus clouds. In Russellville we stopped at a park
and took these pictures of the clouds that would slowly build
over the next several hours.


Around 2pm we decided to head a bit farther east and try and stay
ahead of the racing and growing clouds.
At this point i decided that since there was absolutely no other
signs of anything developing we would continue to pursue these
clouds. Actually the entire rest of the area was devoid of
anything other than small fair weather cumulus. It was obvious
these clouds were moving pretty fast and this would be the
biggest challenge all day.We continued eastbound on I-40 toward
Morrilton. At Morrilton we headed north on HWY 95. North of the
small town of St. Vincent i took this picture of the still slowly
developing clouds

Now the fun began. Having no other choice but to take slow 2 lane
highways i began to get bogged down in the hills of North-Central
Arkansas. The roads were very winding and so our progress was
quite slow. During the entire chase on the small roads we made
very little progress in the way of actually gaining on them, so
it became quite frustrating seeing the clouds developing into
storms that were now going severe. We continued north on 95 to
jct 124 and headed east to the jct with Hwy 65 and from there
continued east on Hwy 92. Near the town of Greers Ferry on Greers
Ferry Lake the road finally turned wet. I was not sure if we were
ever going to quite catch up to the storm when finally we started
to see some of the cloud base structure. It was obviously a
intense storm. At the small community of Drasco the road became
hwy 25 which would take us the rest of the way into Batesville,
Ar. These pictures below are of the lowering on the western edge
of the storm. There appeared to be at times several funnel clouds
dancing around this rotating monster and it looked like any
minute a large tornado would descend.


Another frustrating part of this chase was once we did catch up
to the storm enough to stop and get video and pictures we could
not find a descent viewing location. Finally we were able to find
a spot but it was after we missed what appeared to be through the
woods and hills a larger funnel cloud.


From this same location on this hill we were able to see other
storms developing to the north


Below are 2 animated gifs showing growing storms to the north.
And a interesting apparently struggling storm behind us...also notice to the left of the small storm. That is the edge of another storm that was developing and this is the LP supercell we got in Batesville. AR.