April 3rd South Central OK and Northern TX

(Video of the Large Hail we drove into this day will be posted in this Posting next week)

Thursday April 3^rd 08

We left Elk City and made our way south to Lawton OK to make a new forecast, most of the setup and forecast from wed night early Thursday morning (1am) was similar, except we noticed that the surface winds were lower in the south central OK area and there was a southwesterly wind component a little further to our west.

We decided to wait for the initiation in Duncan OK. We saw development to our northwest but on the radar we noticed a cell
to our northeast, we considered chasing it but it exploded and
then just hauled northeast at 59mph.

We checked wx worx and we noticed a cell that was to our southwest moving NE at 35mph. This one looked promising and the other cell was gone. We wanted to intercept the southwest cell that was intensifying. We decided to try and get past it to get to the southeast side of the cell, so we had to get there quickly to avoid punching the core. We were making good time getting past it so we decided we might be able to even take a little bit of a shortcut. Well we were a little close so we ended up getting into the hail core. We ended up getting quarter to tennis ball size hail and my windshield is now destroyed, but we did get to see some decent structure and and a tad bit of rotation, we might have seen a wall cloud but there was a lot of evaportransportation so it was hard to see if there was anything. There wasn’t enough low level wind for that. We noticed a cell that was more isolated to the southwest and decided to hit that up since the northeast one was appearing to be clustered. We chased it and it had pretty much 0 surface wind besides the downdraft. It was in its dying cycle when we caught up to it.

This GVTS made some great photos and some entertainment as I was out dancing in the hail with my helmet on and then experiencing the RFD in my SUV. We got some good sunset updraft pictures of the cell shearing out and then we left hoping to get some lightning on the way to Elk City. On Friday April 4^th 2008 we stopped in Greensburg KS to show skinner and mark the tornado path and the rebuilding of the town. I met some nice people who were helping get donated toilets out to locals. They apparently have heard of the storms of 2000xx and the money that they got from the proceeds, they apparently like chasers and especially the ones who have been involved in the donations and volunteer efforts to rebuild/renew Greensburg KS.

(What use to be Pizza Hut)