2001-05-27
People: Myself (driver), and Oscar Van Der Velde
Miles: 411
Time: 2:15z - 1:00am CDT     10.75 hours
Drove from Norman to Clinton on I-40, then north to Vici on HW 183 and HW 60. We breifly changed our target area at about 5:30pm to the Enid, OK area. 10 miles east of Orion we heard severe thunderstorm warnings issued for Harper and Woods counties, so we decided to change our target back to the Woodward area. We drove north on HW 281 underneath an anvil with very structured mammatus, and stopped north of the Cimmaron River and south of Waynoka on a small hill. From this location we had a nice wide view of the anvil above, with the shelf cloud initially visible far to the west.

There were numerous anvil crawlers up in the mammatus, and some would end with nice ground contacts off the to north of our position. Over time, the shelf cloud became visible closely to our west, and it was at this time while shooting lightning on reaction, I captured the photograph to the right. We were able to see a lightning stroke far away near the updraft, and it would spider its way out along the anvil before making contact with the ground. If you have a fairly small aperture and use bulb mode (with very slow film: ~50/100 ASA), you can open the shutter when you first see the stroke begin near the updraft, and in 1-2 seconds you can capture the channel touchning down. Oscar was looking through his viewfinder leveling the horizon when this strike started, and I hit my shutter release just in time. He screemed aloud because of his miss, and I screamed aloud because I had just caught one of the most beautiful photographs in my life. For the second time in seven days I had the fortunate luck to capture a very close cloud-to-ground lightning stroke on film.


KVNX Radar at 0029Z (7:39pm CDT)


KTLX Radar at 0248Z (9:48pm CDT)
After the rain reached our location we headed south through Seiling then southeast on HW 270, then southwest on HW 31, and south on HW 54 to Weatherford. We stopped for gas in town, and I stepped outside for less than 60 seconds and came back completely soaked. I had to swipe my card and wait for authorization ... and wait .... and wait ... until finally I was approved; that wait being the main reason I was soaked from head to shoe. We left Weatherford and headed east on I-40 as power was going out in many areas, and frequent CG lightning was still surrounding us. We ended up turning south driving through Hinton to Cogar, trying to find a decent place to shoot lightning with adequate cover.


The only decent location for photographing lightning that night which had an unobstructed view (no power lines), was relatively safe from a direct strike, and had adequate rain cover was just east of Union City, as crawlers on the back of the MCS became visible. Of course the last nice crawler occured right in front of us as we were setting up our cameras, and after that the line decided to quit. Oscar had fun photographing a frog which had joined us in the parking lot, and after that we drove back to OKC then to Norman as some small cells to the west became visible.

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