5/30/2013 - COD Trip 3 Day 7

After the previous day’s disappointing results, we had justifiably higher hopes for this day; although, we were slightly concerned about the weakly capped environment. Nevertheless, the upper-level, negatively-tilted trough had come much further out, yielding westerly upper-level flow across the threat region. In addition, surface winds were progged to improve, lending confidence that areas in central and eastern OK would be favorable for organized severe.  Initiating features were expected to be the dryline draped southwest-to-northeast across western Oklahoma, pendant to an outflow boundary across northern and northeastern Oklahoma, meeting at a triple point near Enid. We departed Dodge City, initially targeting south and east of Weatherford, OK. We headed for Watonga where we made a near rolling gas and lunch stop as convection was beginning to initiate.  Immediately after Watonga, we targeted a storm near Kingfisher, OK, remaining almost entirely on sr-33 west of I-35 as we creeped along on its western edge (we stuck to pavement since farm roads were soaked, yielding nothing but red mud). We were able to jump ahead of the storm immediately east of Guthrie, OK. At this point we now had to battle the “Jungles” of eastern Oklahoma, struggling to get a good view of the storm.  We stayed with this storm as it dealt with mergers and cycles and did manage to spot a well-defined funnel roughly a half way to the ground; however, because of the terrain, we were unable to personally verify that it touchdown. Yet, other spotters that were a bit closer did make reports at the same time that they had witnessed debris/touchdown. We disengaged this storm a short time after as it was clearly about to morph into an outflow dominant mess. We opted to move toward a secondary target much further south, toward storms that had initiated on the dryline and were now around Duncan OK. We made our way through the OKC area and south on I-35 toward Pauls Valley, arriving at the storm(s) just south of the Arbuckle Mountains. The storm exhibited momentarily nice structure, but was rather high-based and had extraordinarily weak inflow. We left this storm for a third(!) target further north, eventually stopping near Wynnewood, OK just off I-35. This storm finally gave us some much more picturesque structure; at first exhibiting a (somewhat) stack-of-plates appearance while generally appearing more outflow dominant, before shifting to a “mothership” type appearance with nice visual vault, beavers tail, wall cloud and striated tower. It was around this time that the mid-level rotation picked up, so we pursued this storm until nightfall, then ended the chase near Sulphur OK, eventually heading up to Norman, OK for the night. Unfortunately, the Fairfield Inn in Norman overbooked our rooms (which we didn't determine until we woke up some guests trying to get into our rooms!), meaning a few of us had to stay at the lovely, smokey Econo Lodge ... cough, cough. [original text by Evan Anderson; modified by Walker]

View from the "rear" of the rear flank downdraft of the first storm near Guthrie.

Van 2 jumps ahead and heads toward a clear slot/wall cloud. This would produce the funnel/tornado in the next couple pics ...

Tornado at this time according to static spotter/chasers. We were moving at the time, and with the trees, it was hard to confirm. We'll chalk it up as a bird fart.

Strong rotation continues with funnel at this time, immediately north of us.

Storm 3 of the day was a beaut. 

Strong rotation as the sun wanes ... watch the lapse below for illustration.

Lapse of the day's storms ... I apologize for the jumpiness in some scenes ... my intervalometer crapped out on the trip.