May 3, 1999

Date: 5/3/99
Parthers: Car 1: Jeff Basara(driver) and Jerry Brotzge. Car 2: Myself(driver), Jennifer Ritterling and Tony Waters.
Miles: about 240
Summary: Supercells everywhere. We saw 3 tornadoes from 2 different storms
The Chase: Here are my pictures from May 3rd, and here is the web page with the NWS storm and tornado map I refer to in the log. Well what is there really to say, every chaser has a story from this day. I really wasn't terribly optimistic in the morning, still feeling the effects of the last night and chase from the past couple days. Needless to say, as soon as storms formed near Lawton, we knew things would be interesting, it was just a matter of if they woulf rom or not. We quickly headed SW on Highway 9. In Grady CO I got a wonderful start to the chase, a speeding ticket. I was the middle car of a 3 car caravan of chasers, and due to my out of state license plates, was the lucky winner. Well that was the last I saw of Jeff that day. We continued west after I got my souvenier to Anadarko. As we got past the hills on the E side of Anadarko, we looked south and saw a tornado on the ground. This was the A3 Cyril tornado. We grabbed a couple quick pictures of this, but then went to the S side of town as the storm was moving NE, and we were not sure how close it would pass to us. In hindsight, the tornado was about 8 miles south of us. We went SW on 291 a few miles. There we decided not to follow the storm we just watched the tornado from, as it was heading towards OKC, there were a lot of chasers, and we were behind it at this point and would have to play catch-up. Also, we looked west and saw another cell exploding, so we went to watch it. From the sideroad to Broxton, OK, we watched it a while and took some pictures. Here a small funnel formed, with the condensation funnel about halfway to the ground. Later we found out this was tornado B2 on the map from the day. After it dissipated, we dropped south a couple miles as the cell appeared to be going more easterly at the time. From here we watched the incredible structure, and then tornado B3 started to form. We then went back north a mile, took a couple more pictures of it, and then north another mile to the Broxton road again, and watched for about 10 minutes. Here we sawe a lot of chaser convergence on this hill. We saw Keith Brown there video taping the tornado. After a few more pictures we followed back north again, into the west side of Anadarko. We drove through tornado damage, form tornado B4, just SW of Anadarko. This tornado formed and dissipated quickly enough that we never saw it even though it was a little ways NE from us. Seeing the mass of cars following storm B, we opted to again drop west after the next cell forming, which became storm E. We got a couple pictures of it, but it didn't look nearly as organized as storm A or B. It was getting dark, so we pulled off the storm and too I-40 eastward to try and find out way back to Norman since we were hearing of the extensive damage in the OKC metro area. No more than 10 minutes after this time storm E had a tornado on the ground, and with all the lightning we probably would have easily seen it. Oh well, we opted to be safer and not chase in the dark. Eventually we did make it back into Norman vis Newcastle. Here is Jennifer's take on the day.

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