2012--Day 2

Day 2

Left Pratt, KS around 12:45 pm or so after a weather briefing with the idea of heading south toward Oklahoma, where there was a moderate risk of severe weather (wind and large hail the major threats).  Before we left, I got to see some nice wave clouds outside the hotel.

After making our way south on US 281 into Oklahoma, we headed west toward Woodward as storms started to fire in Texas.  There were others to the east, but they weren’t as ‘interesting,’  

Quite a frontal boundary extended across Kansas, with a 25 degree temperature difference between Russell to the north and Pratt to the south.

We continued west into Texas, where we attempted to get on the southwest side of a supercell that looked healthy.  Got to see some decent structure (anvil, lowering base, some minor mammatus), but after traveling down some county (read: dirt) roads, the storm petered out.  Sorry, only one picture (I was driving).

After giving up on this one, we headed back east toward Oklahoma on I40 toward Oklahoma City.  The Day 2 outlook has a slight risk of storms across the lower Mississippi Valley, which is outside our chase zone, so we made arrangements to tour the Storm Prediction Center in Norman on Thursday.  After a mediocre meal in Clinton (where we learned that one of the students really hates bugs) and a rowdy ride to OKC, we heard the EAS signal on the radio alerting us to a severe thunderstorm warning for the area we were heading for.  We arrived at the hotel around 11:45 pm CDT, just as the gust front pushed through the area (and yes, we felt it).  Just before we looked north in time to see a well-defined shelf cloud, which managed to be visible even in the dark. 

Final tally for the day: 522 miles, meaning we covered over 1000 miles in just the first two days.