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It seemed fairly clear that we would play Northwest Oklahoma on May 19, 2024. Even with ongoing tornado warned storms in Kansas, we hit the road to get to Northwest Oklahoma. The idea was around Buffalo, but we kept scooting south to play a storm rolling out of the Texas Panhandle.
The Storm Prediction Center had a Moderate Risk over Kansas, mainly for a damaging wind system that was forecast to develop. Chasing wind isn’t that much fun – so we opted for the isolated supercell option in Oklahoma. After some patience, a storm rolled into Oklahoma near Roll.
Storms quickly became supercellular and high-precipitation makers.
This beauty of a storm kept moving east ish – from Hammon – the next town in its path was Butler.
The storm produced some rain-wrapped tornadoes near Custer City, but we didn’t attempt to get too close. We were able to see video from others that wanted to tempt fate and get into the bear’s cage.
After viewing the storm north of Weatherford, we continued east down I-40 to Hydro. We got into some blinding rain – but I did notice a tornado just on the north side of I-40. We exited, but got into traffic that would not move. The outbuilding next to us blew up and went into the air – power flashes were observed. We inevitably got into fierce RFD winds of 80 mph, but the tornado did cross in front of us about 500 feet. It was a low-contrast, weak tornado that overturned a semi on the interstate.
Overall – it was a great chase, minus getting into a sticky situation right at the end. Lesson learned!
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