First Chase of 2019

It’s February and it’s Oklahoma. Although I had never chased this early in the year in this area, stranger things have happened. When I saw an opportunity for storms only a couple of hours from home, I decided to give it a shot.

I waited until midday before I left, as I was torn on driving west on I-40, or southwest on I-44. The late decision helped, as I was able to head west as storms started to develop relatively far north, across eastern portions of the Texas panhandle.

Right from the start, expectations were tempered. With limited daytime heating, surface temperatures were only going to reach the upper 50s to lower 60s. Dew-points may have been high for the time of the year at this latitude/elevation, approaching 50 degrees, but it was not enough low-level moisture to support any intense storm threat. Nonetheless, with substantial deep layer shear in place and cool air aloft, some strong storms seemed likely. Just the prospect of having chaseable storms in February in Oklahoma is enough, so one cannot get greedy.

Heading west on I-40, I reached Elk City as a broken line segment was moving east toward the Oklahoma state line. I wasn’t too impressed with how the storms looked on radar and visually, so there was no point in continuing much farther west. I’ve learned patience in storm chasing, so that I’m not driving in what feels like circles in my car. Another reason to wait was that somewaht better moisture was hanging back to the east in Oklahoma and with cloudiness racing out of that area, there was, in my eyes, a narrow zone for more robust convective development once storms moved into Beckham and Greer counties in Oklahoma.

As storms approached I got into position near Erick and I could make out a well-defined shelf cloud. Given the degree of deep layer shear, it made sense, but honestly, I was mildly surprised. Maybe this was because February is usually not a month I have much luck storm chasing in, especially at this latitude.

A few minutes later, I was able to set up on a north-facing dirt road (without power lines) and captured a few photos of the striated shelf cloud passing by. Admittedly, I was very excited at this point. I haven’t chased much since last fall and I had tempered expectations today. In the end, even though storms never reached severe limits, the structure outperformed my expectations, especially given how lackluster storms looked on radar.

I haven’t chased in southwestern Oklahoma much and it’s also one of the rare times I’ve chased prior to the green-up in the Plains, so it looked and felt like new chase territory. The lack of any other chasers in sight may have played into that as well. It looks like the few chasers who were out tended to stay farther north. I considered that, but was banking on slightly better moisture to the south and perhaps a better shot at some discrete, or at least semi-discrete, storm activity.

I did drift a bit south for a while, but there wasn’t much to see after this last photo. Low-level moisture was lacking and with sunset approaching, temperatures were dropping. Another note was that there was quite a bit of cloud-to-ground lightning with the storms, especially around sunset. Shortly after that, storms quickly weakened as they approached the Oklahoma City metro area.

Overall, this will be a memorable chase for February standards, even if storms remained sub-severe. Most of my early season chases have resulted in messy setups with low contrast storms, but, at least for a short time, storms today were photogenic.