May 3, 2003:

May 3, 2003 was the fourth anniversary of the tornado outbreak which utterly ravaged central Oklahoma and forever seared a respect for storms in those who survived the storms of that day. The parameters for this particular "May 3rd" were not as volatile as the one in 1999, but sufficient for some pretty nasty storms. Quite a few chasers targeted the eastern Texas panhandle and western Oklahoma, but my chase group and I decided that western North Texas looked the best as far as instability issues were concerned.

We messed around with a left-split near Paducah, Texas, but it was obvious that this storm wasn't going to do anything. We heard that the right-split had gotten its act together much further south near, you guessed it, Aspermont. We went southeast from Crowell to get ahead of this big supercell, and it took over an hour to get in position. Unfortunately, we had to punch the core to see what was on the other side. For some strange reason, I wasn't afraid... I suppose I realy wanted to see a tornado. So, we did it. Got up to nickel sized hail south of Haskell. We heard on the weather radio that a multi-vortex tornado had been reported 7 south of Haskell. We emerged from the precip and saw some lowerings, but nothing too substantial. Then seemingly out of nowhere, a multiple vortex tornado (with no obvious contact with the cloudbase) appeared just west of Highway 277. We were less than a quarter mile away, so we repositioned a little farther north. We left the storm before it produced the 1/3 mile wide wedge 20 minutes later because of the lack of road options and the approaching darkness. A fantastic chase day!

Addendum: Also saw a rope tornado NW of this tornado, but I hit "standby" and didn't get any images of it! Drat! :-P

Tornadic Supercell over HW 277
Tornado West of HW 277 South of Haskell
Tornado West of HW 277 South of Haskell

All Images Copyrighted by Gabriel Garfield (2003)