30 May 2001
Chase partners: VUSIT
Result: Supercell in southeast Oklahoma
This was scheduled to be the second-last day of our 10-day
chase, and after some great success the day before, some of the members
of the group were ready to pack it in and head back toward Valpo.
Conditions looked moderately good along a boundary in southern
Oklahoma, which would leave us a very long drive home the next day, but
we decided that we were out there to chase and should see what we could
find.
On our drive south, we saw some impressive wind damage from the derecho
of the 27th. Trying to stay near the boundary, we parked in the
Ardmore area in mid-afternoon to throw the football around and hope
that the cap would break. We saw one of the local news trucks at
a nearby gas station as well as some other chasers. A lot
of Cb towers were going up, but they were getting sheared off
pretty quickly. Considering that the terrain to the south
and east is not the most chaser-friendly, and considering our drive
home the next day, we set a time limit of 6 pm for our efforts that
day. 6 pm came and went with no development, so we headed north
on I-35, and what do you know, the storms start going up to our
east. There were some very impressive towers, so we backtracked a
bit to the south and east toward Ada to see what we could find.
After traversing some of the hills of eastern OK, we got to a nice
vantage point on a storm with a pronounced, rotating lowering and a
radar-indicated tornado warning on it. The storm kept looking
like it might produce a tornado, and we saw what appeared to be a
couple of funnel clouds, but no tornadoes that we could see. We
had a wonderful view of it from our position (which are hard to come by
in eastern Oklahoma), with nice striations aloft and beautiful
structure all around. This storm capped off a pretty successful
chase, especially since we were getting ready to drive home.
Beautiful supercell with mid-level
striations and rotating wall cloud in Hughes county, OK
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