Chasing the Wind

From the outset, March 8th held promise for significant severe weather. But as is typical of early season setups, there were plenty of flies to contaminate the proverbial ointment. In this case, our trouble was very similar to 3/7 in that a very thick cirrus deck overspread the Southern Plains and the moisture also remained rather paltry. However, we were hopeful that the strong forcing (associated with an approaching vort max) would make up for the considerable lack of instability. Also, we hoped that the strong shear would (in a sense) "create" greater instability through vertical pressure perturbations (through storm rotation).

My chase group and I (which consisted of Mark Oerther, Justin Walker, Grant Hicks, Jeff Snyder, Jeff's fiance, Bryan Saliseder, Brandon Lawson, and myself) set out for an initial target of Ardmore, Oklahoma. At the Microtel hotel, we established a WiFi connection and waited for the first storms to fire. We saw Shane Adams and Mickey Ptak again, along with Aaron Kennedy and crew. It was quite the chaser convergence! At any rate, storms did fire to our southwest, but they exhibited anticylonic rotation in the middle levels of the atmosphere (according to the SRV data)! Apparently, the winds above 700 mb were backing somewhat with height, which gave a favorable hodograph (at least, for those levels) for clockwise storm rotation. As the evening wore on, it became painfully obvious that the vort max would not arrive in time for surface based development to occur. We headed home at around 6:45 (a bit later than we expected, due to incredibly slow service at the local McDonald's), and were treated to a nice lightning show to the south and east.

Overall, I give this chase a 3 out of 10, because though we never had surface based storms, we at least had lightning this time around. Also, good company makes for an easier bust.