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Well this day looked pretty good to me until getting there. It was a bit disturbing watching the convection on the outflow of the mcs continue to backbuild and drop south into n OK while driving south. The other bad part about this was the orientation the outflow boundary was taking. It was running more se-nw instead of a prefered e-w. The next thing to go wrong was fairly early initiation not all that far west along the outflow boundary. I got to Enid just intime to get rained on by this early convection. I go east of Enid and head south on I-35 to find convection firing closer to the outflow boundary and not so north of it. I could see the boundary pretty well as I got near Perry by the deeper towering cumulus in the area. I found some bases closer to the sfc boundary to the west of Perry. Stuff was firing here and lifting north of the boundary. I love watching this kind of evolution as often something will finally anchor more and turn east. Everytime a core would lift north it would further strengthen the boundary. I'm looking due west here.
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This reminded me of the Coldwater KS storm on April 1 in how it got going. It now had a better base running more east-west to the ene of what appeared to be the main updraft bases causing this precip. My hope was this boundary would get better and better and help to focus the inflow for the updarfts. The stronger it would get the more intense the updrafts could be, which would lead back to a better e-w boundary...on and on till something could become more dominate and track eastward. This kind of happened but took a lot longer than I had hoped. |
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I head north on I-35 to the Cimarron Turnpike. The core was getting very white west of the interstate. |
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On the turnpike looking wsw. The main base was still in the same area as the hail core got more intense. |
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The base to the wsw appears to be getting deeper and the e-w cloud base ene of the storm became more and more structured and laminar. |
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This is looking north at the long, now pointy, inflow tail running e-w ahead of the storm. |
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The base to the sw appeared to get more and more rounded with rfd notches trying to push east. |
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I go east and the north to Sooner Lake. The storm now is very rounded. |
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As it moves east it really seemed like it had a chance to tornado. It had the nice round base/rfd. The problem was convection just south of this lifting north would soon be on this storm. It rains on this storm and messes up the entire area. |
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At this point the only option seemed to be drop south to the new deeper convection that had fired ne of OKC. I figured the air there had to be much better anyway. So se I went. I get ahead of the storm at Oilton. The ne portion looked like crap so I dropped south real quick and that view looked even worse. It was very linear looking and I was quickly very depressed I ever left home. I am going back north to Oilton here. Right now the rfd seemed to be really cutting in and bowing east. I wondered about this area right ahead of me here. I head east at Oilton and drive in the core getting very few views of the storm thanks to the very crappy terrain. |
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It was really getting organized as I headed towards Tulsa. It earned a tornado warning a few miles west of the city. |
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I finally get some views of what is going on as I get into Sand Springs on the nw side of Tulsa. It did have that cold look to it but it was still nice to look at.
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Couple larger pictures below as it moved closer. |
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