May 19th, 2018 North-Central Oklahoma Bust

Tornadoes: 0

Highest Wind Gust: N/A

Largest Hail: N/A

Isaac and I started off in Salina where we stayed the night. The day before, this day looked to have legitimate potential near a triple point/warm front in southeast Nebraska into northeast Kansas. Many chasers made the one-day trip even if they weren't marathon chasing like we were. A much more substantial jet impulse was forecast to set up over the Central/Southern Plains with great wind profiles and a moderately to highly unstable atmosphere. There was one major caveat, though: the prior day's storms formed into a huge cluster that wiped out any chances for destabilization in NE KS/SE NE, along with substantially weakening/messing up low level wind profiles. However, an outflow boundary was left behind just south of the KS/OK border, where we decided to head. There still looked to be supercell potential in the original target area, but weak low level wind profiles almost certainly forbade any tornado potential.

Long story short: the somewhat promising looking OFB play went up early and turned very messy. We didn't make it in time, but HP/nearly linear grunge through the jungles of northeast Oklahoma didn't sound fun anyway. There was more development just west of I-35, however, and was taking on some supercell characteristics near Enid. We headed for that storm from where we were located in South Haven, KS, only to find very underwhelming structure:

We took a dirt back road to try and keep up with the storm, which almost ended in disaster when it turned into mud further down. Only driving around 30 mph, we drove past a house with a dog out front. Much to our dismay, the dog decided it wanted to greet the mystery visitors, and ran out directly into the road front of us. Isaac had to thread the needle between hitting the dog and ending up sliding us into the very steep ditch (about 6 feet deep). He was successful, but for a second I was sure we'd run it over. We missed it by about 6 inches, and crisis was averted.

We got back to pavement and decided to bail back to I-35 and begin the long drive home. As we did so, though, a big "scud bomb" formed directly in the field to our south, with lots of rising motion, and eventually rotation. It was a few miles south of the main updraft region of the already decaying storm, but radar showed some boundary intersection antics going on. The rotation turned rapid, and we were wondering if it could actually drop a tornado. It was like a rapidly rotating wall cloud detached from any parent thunderstorm. A few wisps of condensation flew up from near the ground, but given how shallow the feature was on radar (using 3D views on GR2Analyst from other chasers who were back home), lacking any real updraft associated with it, we dismissed it.

Here's the feature in question as it started rotating: