june 5, 2005
departure day/bonus storms in oklahoma

Shawn and Ed headed up to North Dakota today to visit some wildlife refuges, so we decided to part ways today. I was unsure about any chase possibilities today or the rest of the week since I had no access to any data in the hotel room and no libraries would be open today (Sunday). So Jay and I decided to head back to Norman, and after dropping me off Jay continued on back to Texas. After I got home I had seen the front had stalled across southwestern Oklahoma, but was unsure about the potential for storms. Winds aloft were still quite strong, but surface winds were weak and extensive cloud cover would cut down on instability. Or so I thought. About an hour after Jay left back for Texas, a storm rapidly formed over southwestern Oklahoma. So I quickly raced out to my car to go after what I thought would be a nice low precipitation storm riding the front northeast towards my general direction. Instead this storm stalled, turned into a high precipitation storm, then began moving due south away from me. As a result I wasn't able to get in front of it in time to see the tornadoes it produced, but was treated to a nice lightning display and some decent storm structure. Here are some pics I got in front of the hotel in McPherson before we parted ways.....

Jay's brand new chase vehicle - which had only 1600 miles on it.
Shawn's chase vehicle - 215,000 miles and still running like a champ. Must be the fish oil.
Jay listens on as Shawn discusses the benefits of taking fish oil supplements before a big chase.

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