After a long, cold winter,
Ryan and I were longing for an opportunity to
get out and take our chances finding ourselves
a nice storm, particularly one containing a
tornado. During mid season, we probably
would have looked at this opportunity and
passed based on location along with many other
negative factors, but the early season draw
had us biting.
We knew we needed an early start as storms
were predicted by the early afternoon and were
forecasted to be in unchaseable area by
3:00pm. Ryan arrives at my house before
7:00am. Before 7:30am, we were on the
road heading south. There appeared to be
two target areas. one along the warm
front forecasted to be near the
Missouri/Arkansas border and the other in the
general vicinity of the
Arkansas/Tennessee/Mississippi borders.
As with our usual routine when our chase
partner Brian Stertz is unable to join us for
a chase, we review our go-to weather models,
read the forecast discussions and hazardous
weather outlooks in the area, then we call to
get Brian's forecast (which we weigh heavily
in our decision), and then Ryan and I discuss
the info and weigh the positives and negatives
from all of the sources to come up with our
chase target.
As we made our way south, we definitely did
not like the massive area of rain that was
covering southeastern Missouri, so we decided
on the more southern target based.
Memphis south was still free of convection and
had the stronger possibility of a broken line
of supercells developing. Brian, along
with the models, agreed the possibility for a
stronger tornado existed and slower storm
motions were in this more southern area as
well. The downfall to this target was
whether it would happen before crossing the
river into Tennessee or Mississippi which
would make it a much more difficult chase
area.
We arrived to the target area around
12:30pm. We had finally broken out of
the rain that we experienced nearly the whole
trip. There were a couple tornado
warnings out to the west in Central Arkansas
earlier, so things looked promising. We
saw a small bow echo approaching our area from
the west, so we chose to
cross the Mississippi River shortly after
arriving in the area. Darn
it! Sure was hoping for
something in the Mississippi River
Valley on the Arkansas side.
Surely, nothing tornadic appeared imminent
though. We shot south on I-55 and made a
quick stop at the Visitors Center for a
Mississippi Road Map (which we did not have -
never chased Mississippi before), then moved
down to Senatobia, Mississippi for the
intercept and an east road option, Highway
4. We began seeing a slight rotation on
the velocity scan and a slight change in shape
in the storm as the bow echo approached our
Highway 4 intersection. Not much to get
excited about, but a start no less. As
the bow echo reaches us, the circulation part
of the storm that we observed on radar was
south of us. Since the storm motions
were slightly slower than the 55mph reported
up in the Boot Heel of Missouri, we did manage
to stay within range of the circulation as we
moved east with it. Not much of a view
into the important part of the storm as the
rain as well as the trees blocked the view
most of the time. Eventually, the storm
began losing that bow structure and began
looking more like a supercell as it moved
east-north east. A more prominent
circulation took shape. The storm gained
ground on us due to heavy rain and slow
traffic and crossed a few miles in front of
us. All we could see was the darkened
area as rain hid the prized part inside.
By the time we reached Holly
Springs, Mississippi, the storm was 5-10 miles
in front of us. Road options became more
of the 'back road' variety at that point with
the storm gaining more space between us.
Then, as if right on cue, the tornado warning
comes out on the storm and 15-20 miles later,
puts down a tornado west of Falkner,
Mississippi. Passed a few more cells on
the trek back west as we started the long
drive back home, but none of those storms
seemed to gain any strength. We
eventually took a look back to the east at the
storms as they moved away from us.
Since the chase day was over and there was
still plenty of daylight, Ryan decided we had
to have a wildlife photography stop, so we
visited the Big Lake National Wildlife Refuse
west of Blythesville, Arkansas on the way home
and got a couple of early season snakes
hanging out and the silhouette of a Great
Horned Owl.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interesting side note to the
chase, as we were going east on Highway 4
chasing the storm, we came across an old
tornado damage path where the trees were
snapped off, limbs stripped off, and every
tree deformed. The homes in the area
were all new with no old structures
visible. This went on for many miles
until the end of Highway 4 when I turned.
Found out later this was a piece of the
path from the December 23, 2015 - EF4
Tornado. Amazing after 3 plus years, the
tornado damage was still so clear. The
pictures don't do it justice as these are
video stills through a blinding rain.
The total length of that tornado was 75.09
miles.
March 09, 2019 
