It was the last day of finals, the last day of our junior year, and the last chase of 2009 (or at least we though it would be). I was completely exhausted from pulling three straight all nighters in a row with little more than an hour of rest per night, but I decided to go chasing anyway. Charles and Doug tagged along and we headed northwest to Woodward, OK. KSBI had contacted us so we were on the clock, making our decision on whether or not to go out much easier. A few storms started to fire early but had trouble amounting to anything special.
When we arrived in Woodward we sat there for an hour or so and watched the radar for any new developments. The discrete storms that had fired earlier had quickly turned into a multicell cluster. The storms did not look like they were going to do anything at all so we started to head back after only being out just over two hours. However, as we were on our way back Brandon, a meteorologist for KSBI, thought that the southernmost part of the multicell cluster might do something so he sent us back to near Woodward to follow this storm. The multicell cluster started to transition into a squall line extending from northern Texas to the midwest and our job was to follow the line into Oklahoma City. The entire line was moving fairly slow so we knew we were in for a long night.
For a while we stayed just ahead of the storm and got some footage of an amazing looking shelf cloud (pictured below). As night began to fall we got out a little ahead of the storm and set up on top of a hill looking towards Kingfisher, OK and shot some live footage as the squall line moved through the area. We encountered a very brief period of pea sized hail with torrential downpours before we were told to head south to Okarche. Since the squall line was angled from the southwest to the northeast we had about five minutes to set up in Okarche before the rain arrived. After getting several live shots for KSBI we continued to follow the storm back to Norman, OK. We remained in torrential downpours for most of the way and encountered several streets that had upwards of 8 inches of water standing in the roadways. Other than that there was no severe weather with these storms and we ended up driving 430 miles in 9.5 hours during our last chase of 2009.
What we saw:
Severe Storms – 2
Tor-warned Storms – 0
Tornadoes – 0
