We left Dumas (TX) late morning and trundled southeastwards towards Wheeler (TX), stopping at Shamrock (TX) for lunch and a refuel. A lot of chaser convergence in the area, surprising number of Brits too! Had a chat with the Netweather team and Dave Ewoldt, before lifting a little north to Wheeler (TX) once again to re-assess.
By this stage, a few storms had began to fire out west, and were rapidly intensifying on just a couple of radar scans. We dropped south to McLean (TX), and parked up just south of town to watch this supercell eventually produce a tornado to our west! After a few minutes it began to get rain-wrapped, so we followed it north and caught it during it's roping out stage just southwest of McLean. There was also some sizeable hail on the grass verges here too.
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| Tornado beginning to form southwest of McLean (TX) |
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| Tornado in progress southwest of McLean (TX), beginning to have wrapping rain curtains |
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| Large hail on the ground just south of McLean (TX) |
Now the tricky and frustrating part - there were two potentially tornadic supercells to chase, both to our east and moving to the northeast at 35-40mph (i.e. away from us) so we then spent several hours playing catch up, trying to get ahead and look into the storms. The northern storm produced a large, rain-wrapped tornado near Wheeler (TX), while the southern storm went to produce a damaging tornado (again, rain-wrapped) near Elk City (OK) - we missed both of these due to the logistical issues (not that they would have been photogenic anyway), but we stopped a couple of times to watch the frequent lightning as darkness fell in the evening, before spending the night in Lawton (OK).
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| Tornado warning (red polygon) for the supercell thunderstorm, with our location (blue circle) |
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| Day 3 GPS tracker |
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