May 13, 2020 Storms

Northwestern Oklahoma

See Bill Reid's summary of the storm here.

We started the day in Canyon, TX with plans to watch storms initiate not far to our east in the Texas panhandle. We attempted to eat Breakfast at a dine-in restaurant, but that failed, so we went to a nearby McDonalds.

We continued onward to Clarendon, TX, where we enjoyed lunch at the Sonic drive-in. From there, we drove up to the Greenbelt Reservoir and decided to wait there until storms initiated. I did a time lapse as the cells near the dryline slowly built into towering cumulus. They were a little far away for comfort, so we decided to leave before the storms had fully initiated on my timelapse.

We drove up to I-40, and we quickly had a severe-warned storm. It looked pretty good, so we decided it was a decent storm to follow. However, it quickly weakened, and we were left with little more than scattered, high-based, weak storms.

We continued slowly east and got into Oklahoma. There, we waited near Sweetwater as the storms restrengthened a bit, and other storms developed just to our southeast. I did another timelapse while we waited. Eventually, we felt we had to go after the storms to our east, but they weakened, and we ended up near Foss Reservoir with a rapidly approaching outflow boundary from a line of storms to our southwest. It wasn't particularly interesting.

At this point, we realized there was a more isolated storm back to our northwest, not far from where we had been. There wasn't much time because the outflow boundary was moving north toward it, and the sun would set pretty soon. I was ready to give up entirely, but Bill said to keep on driving. As we approached from the distant east, we could see it was becoming a pretty serious storm with a fairly hard updraft and a supercellular shape. We arrived at our storm just as the outflow boundary hit it. We watched for a while as the base shriveled and the lightning became less frequent.

With the storm soon gone and the sun below the horizon, we drove to Woodward to stay overnight at the Northwest Inn.

Storm near Sweetwater, OK.

Dissipating supercell storm at sunset.

Approximate route for the day. Bill's log showed 398 miles.

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