Day 4 – The endless conveyor spits out two TORNADOES..!

A marginally better night’s sleep and we’re off for breakfast at the Do Dah Diner in Wichita, a modern take on the traditional 50’s diner with a snappy waiter and decent food satisfying a Plains induced enhanced appetite – I’m always hungry when chasing.

After yesterday’s long repositioning day the next few days have a severe risk in this general area which is as good as it gets including an enhanced (i.e. 4^th of 6) risk today. We stock up at Walmart, head west then south on Highway 99 towards Oklahoma with an initial target of Bartlesville, the idea being to sit on the boundary, chill out with a picnic and be in the prime position to react to how things develop. As we drive south there are floods everywhere with reports of closed roads so we’ll have to keep our eye on that to avoid driving into a dead end.

The SPC upgrades the risk to moderate, one notch lower than Monday’s top end high risk with a 15% hatched area for significant tornadoes. We continue south with one of the “Little House on the Prairie” houses occupied by Laura Ingalls Wilder not too far to our east (not the Walnut Grove one Liane).  I rummaged through by day bag and find a Twix from a couple of days ago. It’s mutated into an alien life form but gets scoffled anyway. We continue south and stop at a small park in Dewey to eat our picnic. It’s here that I make the alarming discovery that my “no added sugar” smoothie contains a whopping 55 grams of the stuff. Make’s the bottles of iced coffee look positively healthy…

We head into Bartlesville, and with half an hour to kill visit the free to enter Phillips Company Petroleum Museum which documents the history of the company from its first oil strike near the town in 1905. Includes an early biplane (replica?) hanging from the ceiling owned by the founder of the company. Bartlesville also contains a building designed by famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

We return to the vehicle and a Particularly Dangerous Situation tornado watch has been issued just to our south west so that’s where we are headed. We head through Tulsa and continue south, storms are now firing to our south west one of which has just been tornado warned and has grown to 52,000 feet. The watch is extended to our position.

The game is on, we have a storm and it’s at 60,000 feet and not long later becomes tornado warned. It’s travelling at 29 knots so we’ll have to be adroit. The road network is good with duel carriageways but stopping safely will be a challenge but not as much of a challenge as the trees which are everywhere blocking out the horizon and any potential tornado with it. That’s the problem when you case in the east of the Plains.

We continue to head south on US75 and then on intercept course west on the I40. We drive about 20 miles then do a U turn and parallel our storm which is directly to our north. There’s a distinct lowering but those sodding trees lining the road and several hillocks are blocking the view. Really frustrating. I’m sat in the far back of the SUV with a direct view of the action through a none opening tinted window and somehow, by contorting myself like an Eastern Bloc gymnast manage to haul my heavy camera bag from the rear, put it on my knee and extract a camera. To get a half acceptable shutter speed I have to ram the Z7’s ISO to 4000 but needs must. There’s clear turbulent activity going on but what? Finally primed against the window I get a glimpse of what looks like a cone tornado, then there’s a bit of a treeless gap and there it is – tornado on the ground! Focussing through the window is not straightforward but I reel of several shots and get a couple of half decent images somewhere near Hennryetta. The tornado dissipates and we continue driving when it puts down a second! Just as I do so the radar refreshes (it does this every 10 minutes) and there is the classic hook echo of a debris ball. The radar usually picks up precipitation, this ball of an echo will be trees and other solid matter picked up by the tornado and currently flying around in the air.

We stair step north east back up US75 then US62 at Okmulgee. Our storm is weakening as another storm to its south west puts out an anvil over it and steals its warm moist inflow. We wave it goodbye and our attention is now on the new storm. We’d seen very few chasers at this point but now there was a bit of a convergence including Reed Timmer who flies past in the Dominator followed by his disciples down a road we know to be closed as it’s flooded. Ooops.

Our new storm puts down a very impressive and quickly rotating wall cloud but no tornado. We head north west at Muskegee on intercept course and through Broken Arrow on US13.

We stop south of Tulsa airport for a last viewing with a storm either side up us, one displaying a stout, white updraft and the other an anvil. It’s now getting late so we retrace our steps for the 175 mile journey back to our hotel stopping only to force down some gas station “food” to sustain us as we won’t be back to the hotel (same hotel in Wichita as last night)  until after 23:00. There’s bugger all left so I grab a chicken and cheese burrito which I’m not about to describe. We’ll source some celebratory beers when we’re nearer the hotel, then bed for another day of chasing tomorrow. We’ve got an enhanced risk so are currently targeting Dodge City with a review in the morning.

As it happens we didn't get back until nearly midnight, the beers will have to wait until tomorrow :o(

Bloody good chase but a long 15 hour day!

Total Miles: 577

NB these photos are untouched straight out of the camera and need to be tidied up as they are low in contrast - I'll sort that when I'm back in Blighty.