February 24, 2000

Date: 3/2/00
Partners: Danny Cheresnick(driver), Jennifer Ritterling and Jill Zinser
Miles: 408.7 miles
Summary: A Moderate risk day with a PDS Tornado Watch again. We saw some storms, but didn't really get too close. Nothing looked that great, and there were no tornado reports, only hail.
The Chase: At 12:00 PM we left Botie's across the street from Sarkey's and were planning on heading south on I-35 and then west to Bowie (boo-e), Texas. We got off of I-35 at Gainesville, Texas and went west on hichway 82. Then we went SW on 59 to Bowie. Around 2:00 PM a PDS Tornado Watch was issued from 10 miles E of Abilene to 40 miles NW of Fort Sill, Oklahoma. At 2:37 PM we stopped at the Subway in Bowie for food. We left Bowie at 3:02 PM. On the radio we heard there were some storms in Stevens CO. Texas, which was 2 counties SW of us. We were stuck in low grunge still, and couldn't really see anything. We decided to head SW towards the storms, but shortly after leaving we saw the towers from the line up north in Okalhoma, and they looked pretty nice from where we were, so we decided to go W on 287 towards Henrietta, Texas instead since we had better road options there. We got ot Henrietta at 3:50 PM and stopped at the library there to look at some data. From there the storms north looked lousy, and the storms south and southeast were not impressive either. The anvils had all seeded one another, and formed a very linear looking storm. We saw that the dryline was just west of us, and the warm front was a little north of us. So we were where we wanted to be, just nothing was happening. We then called Chris Weiss back in Norman in the map room. We basically found out that same thing. We started west a little out of Henrietta, but quickly realized our winds had shifted to westerlies, so we had gotten past the dryline. We turned around, and decided to just go east on 82 back to Gainesville. The line to the north looked crappy, and everything SE was still a line. If anything was going to rotate it would have to be back closer to Dallas, so we headed east giving ourselves the best shot at seeing something. At 6:00 PM there was a severe thunderstorm warning in Denton, Texas when we were in Gainesville, so about 30 miles south. We thought about going after it, but we would have had to drive through the storm to get where we wanted to be, and daylight was soon going to be a factor. It did drop 2 inch hail in the Denton area, so I am glad we didn't go into it. The only other option was following it a little east for lightning, but we decided to cut our losses and get back to Norman fairly early. 8:13 PM back at Sarkey's, and heading to the Marble Slab with Jill for my traditional post-bust ice cream when I get back early enough that they are still open. This was clearly our most successful chase of the season so far, which is depressing. The tally for this season so far:
Moderate risks: 3
PDS Tornado Watches: 3
Chases I went on: 3
CG's (cloud to ground lightning strikes) outside of Norman: 0
Overall, this has been a rough season so far, over 1000 miles for nothing. Oh well, the best season is yet to come.

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