March 2, 2008 SW Oklahoma Chase


We left Norman at about 10:30am to make are way to Quanah, TX to pick up my friend before we started our chase. We made it to Quanah after fighting a strong head wind all the way down there around 1pm. An intense cu field had alread developed on top of us so we quickly got back to Altus, OK on the other side of the Red River. The storms were clustered together all down the line and if a few became dominate it would be a good day. A couple storm really acted like they were going to dominate but other cells just kept forming.

We stayed South most of the day near Altus and Snyder as there was not enough potential to make me really want to try stay up with the stuff moving away to the NE. Went through a nice hail core with marble size to the east of Altus(picture 1 below). After this storm passes we dropped back down to 62 and moved east with the next storm. It developed a large flat base (largest I saw this day) just north of Snyder. After watching this nice base a few minutes we began to move east to get ahead of it when a decent wall cloud came down over the mountains to our north (picture 2 below). Rotation was very visible with the eye, but it need a lot more before anything would happen. We followed it up to Roosevelt till we could see the rotation was no more (picture 3 below). We then turned back toward Quanah to call it a day. We got cored by one more storm east of Altus that had a nice base on it after dark. Got hit by a few stones that were close to quarter size judging by the sound when they hit the Jeep.

Here Are the pictures: