May 07, 2019 There was a lot of anticipation leading up to this potential 2 day chase possibility as we were eyeing this setup multiple days in advance. My son Ryan and I once again coordinated with Brian Stertz to have him join us for this trip.
We left early in the morning to pick up Brian in Kansas City. Due to Brian's hectic work schedule, he needed to work until 11:00am before he was able to leave, so we picked him up after work and headed out. The primary target of the day was in the Texas Panhandle, but due to our late start in departing, we chose the closer, secondary chase target in southern Kansas on the warm front.
We got down to our target area near the Kansas / Oklahoma Border near the towns of Harper, Anthony, Kiowa. We watched storms build shortly after arriving in the late afternoon. We played tag with several storms just to our north. Although, some of the storms became severe warned, none of them showed any drastic rotation.
Those storms also threw off an outflow boundary that drifted to the south into Oklahoma and then stalled. We waited for that to trigger new storm development, but that was slow to happen. We were seeing little hope for tornadoes on the cells to the north or on the outflow boundary south.
Seeing all of the tornadic activity in the middle and southern Texas Panhandle, we came to the conclusion since we were in an area of decreased tornadic potential, we needed to drop south into Oklahoma and get south of the outflow boundary into the more unstable, warmer air mass. We targeted a few northern Texas Panhandle storms as they moved into Oklahoma with the idea that maybe one of these could become a tornadic cell. We intercepted a few of these cells as we worked our way southward in Oklahoma. As it became nightfall, we had worked our way as far south as Seiling, Oklahoma. With no cells showing tornadic potential within range, we gave up our chase as it became dark. We headed for Enid, Oklahoma for a hotel after a long day of driving.
Unfortunately, none of the cells we had seen this day had any more than minor rotation and showed little in the way of becoming tornadic. The storms in southern Kansas and Northern Oklahoma continued into the night became prolific rain makers. That served to not only stabilize the air in Oklahoma and Kansas for the next day virtually eliminating the possibility of tornadic storms, but flooded many major roads including the main interstate, I-35 making finding a non-flooded route home extremely difficult. We navigated around the multiple road closures as we worked our way back north on our route home. Every waterway along our path was flooded and well out of its banks. Some spots received in excess of 10 inches of rain.
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39 Hours - 1,308 Miles
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