The Smell of Fresh Pine: May 25, 2024 Oklahoma Tornado

Published on May 25, 2024

In keeping with the theme of 2024, May 25th looked like another end of the world setup in the plains. As with many of these apocalyptic setups however there are distinct (and annoying) failure modes that can trash the entire day — a circumstance that quickly made itself known on May 25th. Early in the day it became obvious that robust convection would develop in northwest Texas — well before the best environment would take shape — and act to potentially trash the setup by pushing left splits and outflow through what would’ve otherwise been a pristine thermodynamic environment. Unfortunately for us (but quite fortunately for the people of Oklahoma) this is exactly what happened; while storms were still in their relative infancy in Western Oklahoma, outflow pushing north made it a race against time.

By mid-afternoon a storm had developed near Arnett, Oklahoma and quickly matured in an extremely unstable environment. John, Kayla and myself were in good position and were able to get on the developing supercell quickly and were treated to a very large, broad base with a stout wall cloud almost immediately. This was relatively short-lived however as the rotation soon became diffuse and turbulent. With outflow quickly crashing up from the south, we were concerned that our time with this storm was short and that it needed to do something quickly — and did it ever. Within a few minutes, the storm ingested the vorticity rich outflow boundary and went from presenting a long, strung-out base to a rapidly rotating wall and funnel near Mutual, Oklahoma. Seconds later, a tornado was on the ground tearing up trees about a mile in front of us. While brief, the tornado was quite pretty, taking on a beautiful silvery-white truncated cone/elephant trunk appearance before roping out dramatically in front of us.

While racing to keep up with the storm, we drove through what was thankfully only minor tree damage and got a strong whiff of fresh pine — the product of the trees the tube had snapped in half on either side of the road. Unfortunately for us, the outflow did its damage and the storm chase was largely over at this point. While the day didn’t live up to expectations its never a bad day when you see a pretty tornado!