It took some time for the storms to get organized, and we sat parked about ten miles SW of Roosevelt for half an hour, watching as a couple of feeble attempts at wall clouds developed and dissipated.
The cell further SW began to intensify and show an increasingly-opaque core, which was blocking the updraft base from our perspective, so we moved a bit farther west to investigate. The below image was from our initial position before relocating.
We ended up making the mistake of falling behind the storm as it was very near to the Jackson/Kiowa line, but before punching through the precip to get back in front of the now-severe warned cell, we witnessed a possible funnel cloud a couple of miles to our NE from E of Warren. Due to our distance, we could not confirm any rotation, but the mystery feature looked quite laminar, and persisted for a couple of minutes before becoming shrouded in rain/hail. Who knows.
We were moving back EWD along HWY19 towards Roosevelt as the TOR was issued for the Gotebo area, and it was about this time that we encountered some pretty heavy rain associated with another cell to our SW. We continued east through Roosevelt as the rain intensified and mixed with some small hail, before finally busting through to the other side near the Cooperton area. As the visibility continued to significantly improve, we could see a developing wall cloud with some increasingly impressive motions just to our south. After scooting along the E-W segment of 19 running from SH54 to SH115 for about a mile, we stopped to take pictures and video of the now rapidly-rotating wall cloud only about 1/4-1/2 mile to our WNW. Tommy was on stills for this segment of the chase, and got some excellent shots of this feature; the location is along Highway 19, roughly 4NE Cooperton, and the time is about 510-515pm.
The cloud motions were incredible at this point, and this was probably the strongest rotation not resulting in a tornado that we've seen in four years of chasing together. The video of this came out pretty well, too, so we'll probably try to get it up by week's end.
After this area of rotation weakened significantly a few minutes later, we continued eastward to get a couple of more shots of the storm structure from about 15 miles south of Carnegie. It seemed like everyone and their dog was out today, and this was definitely one of the largest examples of "chaser convergence" that we've personally been a part of. There had to have been at least twenty chase vehicles within a ~1mi^2 area around this time.
Overall, this was quite an excellent start to 2008's chase season, covering roughly 300 miles in a seven-hour period. It was also topped off by an excellent strong storm at home in Norman around 9PM, which brought copious amounts of pea-sized hail and some nice lightning. Yay spring!!
As always, questions and comments are welcomed.
