APRIL
21, 2004 Fort Smith AR & Sallisaw OK Storm
This
chase begain in the KFSM TV-5 studios looking over the latest
weather and radar data. I was a weather intern at the time
and i was in early that day as the SPC had western Arkansas and
eastern Oklahoma under a moderate risk of severe weather.
Storms initially started to fire a little before noon southeast
of Ozark, Arkansas. They slowly increased in intensity
through the early afternoon.
By 3pm the storms over by Ozark were going severe with large
hail, more interesting to me howevere were the storms going up
fast west of Ft. Smith. Within just a few minutes we were
getting reports of hail covering the ground in Roland and since
the storm was intensifying and heading east i decided to
go.
We only made it to Moffet, OK before we started experiencing the
hail. We made our way to Moffet schools were we had some
protection if it came to needing it. Soon we started
getting quarter size hail and the hail was starting to cover the
ground. The hail did start to get smaller after a few
minutes just more of it and then it seemed to be slacking
off. We pulled over to near the football field to video the
hail covering the track when i noticed something hit in the
field. After a moment i saw another land on the
track...hail to near the size of baseballs. In a puddle
(see picture below) a hailstone caused a large splash. We
decided we should head for cover to avoid a smashed windshield.
The hail decreased again in size but not in intensity. A
few minutes later we decided to go back to KFSM and drop off our
video before going on. Even the roads had become hail
covered by this
point.
Moffett, OK HAIL
Video
After dropping off the video we continued down Grand Avenue in
Fort Smith where it was still hailing although smaller and less
intense. There was also some serious street flooding on the
side streets (see pic below). We got onto I-540 and headed
north toward Van Buren. At this point we had two
options...go down HWY 59 from Van Buren into Barling and follow
the hail storm (a wall cloud had been reported) east or could get
on I-40 and head west toward some new storms out west of
Sallisaw.
We choose the storms west of Sallisaw and we were soon
racing west on I-40. A short time later a Tornado Warning
was issued for Sequoyah county. Near Sallisaw we began to
see nice storm structure and the apparent large wall cloud/meso
that hung menacingly on its southern flank. We continued on
till we were basically under the front base of the wall cloud
itself. We made it just past Vian when we had toww cut
across a maintence road to I-40 eastbound. The wall cloud
had some rotation but it definately didnt look like it was going
to drop a tornado. We did see what appeared to be a brief
funnel dancing out of below the cloud...while we were right under
it... but not for sure. We stayed just ahead of the storm
for the next hour and a half. The more typical wall cloud
was continually evolving into more of a wall cloud/shelf cloud HP
hybrid.
Sallisaw, OK Storms
Video 1
Sallisaw, OK Storms
Video 3
At Van Buren our camera batteries were running low so we
decided to go back to KFSM. It was there that i found the
coolest thing about this chase. During one part of our
drive ahead-park-video-wait for it to catch up-speed back a head
saga ..etc.. The lightning had become quite close so i put the
camera on a tripod in the back of our truck. While i was in
the truck there were several loud claps of thunder but i didnt
think anything of it till the beautifull and close lightning bolt
appeard on the video..both less than a mile away...one that
looked like it was just on the other side of the road.
This
storm as well as the earlier Fort Smith hailstorm continued east
into central Arkansas. Numerous reports of large hail (up
to 2.75") were reported all along the Arkansas river valley
from both of the storms as well as the earlier storms that formed
near Ozark. Luckily though there wasnt much property damage
other that the thousands of hail damaged cars.