Panhandle Splendor!
Published on 2 Jun 2007 at 6:11 pm.
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Filed under Storm Chasing.
The last day of May again brought incredible skies to the plains. Scott Peake and I were fortunate enough to witness nature’s fury in the form of a highly electrified cylindrical spinning mass of water vapor over the flatlands of the Oklahoma Panhandle with nobody else around … or so it seemed. Apparently we were of the few that jaunted north from the main highway by three miles and escaped the hordes of radar trucks and assorted storm chasers with their flashing porcupines on wheels (POWs). We hardly saw anybody around … maybe a local or two… otherwise it was just us and the magnificent maelstrom before us…golden wheat fields all around.
We sat around watching the incredible display approach from just west of the ghost town of Muncy. The structure was one to behold with a series of visually rotating stacked plates with a beautiful beavers tail feeding rapidly in from the east. Lightning stabbed the ground every few seconds out of the visual vault region of this storm which was teetering between “HP” and “wet classic” at times.
Below is a view of the storm as it approached Muncy …..what a wonderful scene! I loved the rustic old grain elevator …..if walls could talk! Look closely and you can see two distinct circulations… one about ready to rotate northwest into the core where the beavers tail intersects and a new one forming on the flank and heading east … in our direction.
A tornado touches down as a rather sizeable multiple vortex right near where we were in Muncy at 20:06. We have moved east and set up again on county rd 40 to watch it approach:
The tornado then wraps in rain from time to time and then finally begins a rather spectacular ropeout about two miles west of us at 20:17. The motion was exquisite!
