4/21/08 Chase: The Long Wait

My Top 3

Left the house today around 4PM after changing my mind from playing the triple point up in Okarche to staying closer to the moisture convergence and to a strong N-S option in Purcell. Got to Purcell around 4:30, settled in for a long wait with a cold drink and good view.

I sat there for hours, waiting for something other than little cumulus bubbles to roil around. NC called me and pointed out that on the OKC radar’s BREF1 there was a nice boundary collision happening (for some reason, I had been watching BREF3 and missed this entirely until this point) just to my west. “Perfect,” I thought, “today was marginal with a split forecast to begin with, and now I’m sitting downrange of just the trigger that I need.”

Finally around 7:00 things started to look better, with TCu starting to go up for real in the area of the boundary crash. I snapped a few and then dropped south and west to around the Maysville area for the duration of the chase.

The storm itself started as an LP with reasonable structure and a well-defined, if somewhat elevated, rain-free base. It didn’t look impressive on radar, but the structure was nice.

I made a quick stop at a gas station in Maysville. When I got back into the car, radar showed that the storm blossomed suddenly. I dropped south of town to get out of the core’s way while it dropped 1-2 inch hail over the area. At this point, it was dark enough that I couldn’t get a camera on anything, so I waited on a side road while the slow-moving beast cleared the highway home.

All in all, it was a quicky chase, around 80 miles total driven today. While the storms weren’t filling the pots, it was a good day to experiment with my still photography technique. And I made it home in time to catch the early run of Adult Swim.