I had this on my old blog, but figured I’d post it up today since it wasn’t there. Was a memorable day for me as I learned first hand why you dont punch cores on tornadic supercells. Had I punched the core west of Mena, I probably wouldn’t be typing this blog today:
Left Sherman kind of late around 3:30pm and headed up US 69 towards McCalister. Caught up with the storms just east of Hartshorne, Oklahoma and made the call to go down SH 63 wich was the right call. We immediately noticed rotation and filmed a pretty impressive funnel that came down in front of us. “Walking through the jungle” is no easy task, so we kept driving, hoping not to lose the storm. We could see out the North side of the vehicle through the trees that the storm was still rotating vioently and that’s when we saw the tornado come down. When we reached the intersection of SH 63 and SH 1, the tornado was on the ground and stayed on the ground for approx 5 minutes. From that point, with the road network the way it was, there was no way we could even think about catching up with it, so we pulled off at Talihina and proceeded to intercept the storm in Pushmataha county. The one that ultimately ended up in Mena.
We tracked this storm to the intersection of US 259 and SH 63 (Big Cedar) where we encountered golf ball sized hail. We were behind the storm and thought hard about core punching. It was getting dark and something in the back of my mind kept telling me not to do it. GR was showing HUGE rotation consistently and it was obvious looking at the clouds from our perspective as they came over the mountain. It was the right call. When we let the storm get a little further ahead, we headed on east on SH 63 where right at the AR/OK state line, we encountered trees all over the road. Totally impassible. There was a man standing there, and we asked him how long they had been down, he said approx 5 minutes which if we hadn’t stopped, would have put us in the direct path of the storm. The tornado was rain wrapped. He said it was rainging hard, the winds got heavy, and trees started falling. About that time, a volunteer fire crew emerged from the trees and said that the road was impassible for approximately 1 mile.
I haven’t got pictures or video loaded yet. Didn’t get home until 1am. I hate chasing in the jungle, but all in all it was a good day for us!
On the other side, I had a technical nightmare most of the day. My DeLorme puck kept making my aircard freeze up and what I thought I had figured out on Chaser TV, I learned wasn’t right. I keep reading about putting the computer down and just chasing, using my own judgement, and without the computer in my lap, I learned a lot about my skills.
Today was the first tornado I bagged without technology!!
