5/13/2009 - Oklahoma Supercell

Once again, Wednesday featured pitiful shear juxtaposed with pretty good instability. I do wonder if we will ever see a day in the Plains this chase season with greater than 40 kts of 0-6 km shear. Oh well -- at least this week has featured some storms; next week will probably provide little or no storm opportunities in the Plains. We targeted the western end of the cold front as it slowly drifted southward across northwestern Oklahoma.

Before storms fired in the late afternoon, we ate BBQ at Jigg's, played another round of "football horse" at a Clinton, OK town park, and took in a refreshing cerveza at a local watering hole.

I'm certain this is what "W' had in mind with the "War on Terror". Yep, you guessed it: this was found in a Wal-mart parking lot.

Benton getting an eyeful of the Pig Sickle at Jigg's.

Adam's nearly fatal attempt at eating the BBQ beef sandwich at Jigg's. He had just finished a "Big Bang" (aka Grand Slam) at Denny's an hour before this BBQ stop. Poor fella.

Who knew that Indians were Nazis?

Benton investigating yet another "suggestive" mural.

We left Clinton after boredom set in and headed northward to the small town of Custer City, where we briefly enjoyed the town park. At about 5 pm, towering cumulus began to form along the cold front just to our north. We targeted a tower near Fairview, trucking to Watonga, Hitchcock, and Loyal before allowing the storm to chase us back south to I-40. The severe storm wrapped up and produced a wall cloud near the town of Bridgeport. Unfortunately, the storm's inflow was rather insignificant and low-level shear was just not where it needed to be for tornadogenesis. We followed the storm to Cogar, where we broke off the chase and headed to Oklahoma City for the night.

The storm as it appeared in Blaine County, OK.

Late evening mammatus shot.

The storm was very electrical, featuring a good amount of C-G, anvil crawler, and anvil zit action.

The storm at maturity near Hinton, OK -- featuring a rotating wall cloud and wet RFD.

Anvil crawler poking through mammatus.

A movie that includes a number of time-lapse video clips taken during the day. The second clip features a rather unique, and rare, "horseshoe" vortex moving upward along the flank of the updraft.