April 2, 1999

Date: 4/2/99
Parthers: Car 1: Jeff Basara(driver) and Brian Fehrn. Car 2: Myself(driver), Jennifer Ritterling and Tony Waters.
Miles: 338
Summary: We saw a very nice supercell with a wall cloud near Elk City, Oklahoma.
The Chase: We left from Sarkey's at 2:34 PM heading west on highway 9 to I-44. There was a tornado watch out for central Oklahoma. We then went south the the Love's nera Lawton on I-44, where we arrived at 4:10. We decided there to continue east towards Altus. At 4:25 we stopped at the Quantah Parker trail marker on highway 62 to watch the news out of Lawton on Jeff's TV. We also threw the football for a little while there. There were some sumulus clouds all around, and a strong SE wind. We also could faintly see an anvil cloud way to the SW. The radar on the news showed a storm down near Childress, Texas. We then continued to Altus and arrived there at 5:33. From Altus we went north on 283. There still was that storm near Childress, but it looked like it was starting to die a little bit, plus we had a very solid tower going up to the NW. On 283 we went through Blair, Oklahoma. This is one of the worst towns I have even been thoguh. The speed limit drops to 25, and then the main road is torn up, so we have to slow down even more. There also was the disturbing man without a shirt on mowing his lawn on a riding lawnmower next to the road. It wasn't pretty. Finally we got out of that crappy town though. Thew storm was looking much better with a nice backsheared anvil. At 6:18 there was a tornado warning issued for Roger Mills and Beckham Counties, which was out storm. We did get a brief view of the base of the storm and saw some sort of lowering, but we couldn't be sure what it was since we were still a little ways away. We took OK highway 6 to highway 9 (again except a ways west of Norman) to highway 34 northward. This got us to I-40 which we took eastward to where 34 went north again. Somewhere in this area we passed Jim Leonard, the first time I had seen him on a chase. That was encouraging since he is one of the most famous chasers. We stopped on a farm road at about 6:40-7:00. Here we watched the storm to our west. It still had a tornado warning on it, however we couldn't see any signs of the rotation. I then got outflowed for the first time, which was quite a sight to see the dust coming towards you from miles away. We went east a little more, but quckly ran out of daylight. By 7:45 we were back at I-40 heading for OKC again. Overall this was a good chase, my first supercell of 1999.


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