featuring Connor Mockett
Hello, everyone! Welcome back to Life with Connor the Weatherman. This column will be yet another chase day story from my Chasecation to Tornado Alley this past May. Last column I talked about the best chase I’ve ever had on May 23rd, where we saw an amazing tornado and amazing storm structure. This next story comes from May 25th!
After our amazing day on May 23rd in Southwestern Oklahoma, we actually drove to Texas to try and chase on the 24th. It wasn’t a guaranteed chase day, but we decided to try it out anyway because we were close to the target area, only 2 hours from where we stayed the night in Vernon, Texas. Nothing much ended up happening, just a few tornado warned storms, but none of them came close to producing anything. So, we drove back into Western Oklahoma for our May 25th target.
We stayed the night in Elk City, Oklahoma, in anticipation that May 25th could be the biggest day we’ve had yet on this trip. The Storm Prediction Centre in the US issued a Moderate Risk for severe weather (level 4 out of 5), with a 15% chance for strong to violent tornadoes in Western and Central Oklahoma. All signs were pointing to a crazy day.
The team woke up at 9:00am on the 25th to have a meeting as a team as to how we wanted to play the day out, considering this was the biggest risk for tornadoes of the trip, and we wanted to stay safe. We talked, looked at models, and decided that we actually didn’t even need to leave Elk City where we had slept the night. So we hung around, went and had lunch at a burger joint, got filled up with gas, and played the waiting game.
Eventually, storms started to fire in the Texas Panhandle and moved towards the Oklahoma border. Our target storm ended up being a bit further north than we were, so we drove to a small town called Vici, Oklahoma and waited for the storm to come right at us. It was showing signs of rotation as it came at us, as we could see it on the radar. It looked good initially, until the storm started to kind of split in half.
We drove further to the east of Vici, near Mutual, Oklahoma, and the storm started to get its act back together very fast. We saw the rotating occlusion from afar start to ramp up quickly, and soon thereafter, a weak elephant trunk tornado touched down right near Mutual, Oklahoma (elephant trunk meaning a small and long tornado). We were a few miles away from the tornado, but close enough to see the circulation on the ground and snap a few photos of it.
That tornado would be the only tornado that storm would produce. The storm struggled for its entire life cycle afterwards, due to so many other storms being around, and interactions between them and our storm hindered it from developing further and dropping more tornadoes.
As a whole, the day did not go as planned for every storm. There were more storms than models predicted, so the environment was not as clean as it should have been. There were only a few tornadoes in Oklahoma, and about 10 in Texas, so in hindsight, Texas actually ended up being the better target.
After our chase, we stayed the night in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was supposed to be our final night of the trip. We ended up extending the trip another day, but that will be another story in itself (that day actually contributes to multiple stories, some funny, some painful). I will talk to you all in a couple weeks. Thanks for reading!
