We positioned ourselves in the best possible spot from the beginning of the day. As the day began we went to our hotel in Weatherford and then went back to the west in advance of the dry line/outflow boundary intersection (commonly referred to as the triple point). We could see towers going up along the boundary on satellite, and as they got closer we could see the towers ourselves. We could tell that we were close to initiation.
We went west a few miles to get closer to the convection. We were watching the sourthern tower for development, but it began to fizzle as the second tower went up quickly. The reflectivity was increasing in intensity quickly, and the flanking line had a beautiful rain free base. We busted north to make sure we could get in position for this storm. We got to the top of a hill to observe the storm and suddenly saw a lowering quickly lowering to the ground. As I got out of the car I could see a debris cloud as the funnel almost reached the ground. I got a video of almost the entire tornado which lasted about five minutes. Here is a picture of what it looked like.
About 5 minutes after the tornado we saw vortex 2 drive into town. Even though we want them to get as much data as they can it felt good to out forecast them and be there from the very beginning instead of playing catchup. The best part is that this was the only tornado all day which was not rain wrapped. After that we kept heading east to stay ahead of the storm, but the tornadoes immediately became rain wrapped in an HP (high precipitation) supercell. As we were heading east a new cell developed south of that original storm and we stopped in kingsfisher, OK to watch it come in. As we were in town the tornado alarms went off and the power went out. We realized were way too close and a funnel cloud began to come down to our west. We flew south out of town to a safe area, but no tornado ended up coming down.
More to come. Back to hotel for now.
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