Day 4: Cut Class, Chase Storms

The morning was bright, the air was crisp, the CAPE was high… but none of this mattered to us at
precisely 0800 this morning since we had to go to school first.  To teach, of course- the second
professional development evolution on SWIFT has been for the students to become the teachers
and guide several classes of eighth graders in hands-on science demonstrations.  Whoever
decided that we were both a) qualified to teach and b) knowledgeable in science clearly had a lot
of faith in us, but then again I suppose we’ve also been entrusted to chase tornadoes, so teaching
eighth graders for two hours may just be the less dangerous force of nature.  All jokes aside though,
the folks at Nathan Hale Junior High in Tulsa were extremely kind and receptive to us, and it was a
privilege to be able to share what we knew with them and answer their questions.

Severe storms wait for no school bell, however!  As soon as we got back to the hotel, the weather
team re-checked the storm prediction center website and found that a severe thunderstorm warning
had been issued in Northwest Oklahoma.  What’s more, upon looking even further into the storms,
we found that they would be forming and moving into a location just at a time that we could feasibly
drive to. These warnings were completely unexpected- one of the major storm prediction models
had undersold some of the contributing factors, and as a result most predictions hadn’t included
anything significant.  Nevertheless, we rolled with it and headed up into the direction of the panhandle.
A few hundred miles and a quick stop for lunch later we began tracking the storm visually. It was
neat to be able to see and feel a lot of the processes we had learned about in class actually happening
in the sky- inflow and outflow regions, updrafts and downdrafts, some slight rotation, etc.  Not that we
ever doubted it, of course, but one can only talk about a spreading cold pool so much before they
either see it in real life or they accept it as some voodoo magic.

The storms we found were healthy.  They were not supercells (storm mode was a multicell today,

shoutout to all the meteorologists on the blog), and had very little low level storm relative helicity, so
tornadoes really weren’t expected.  However, the sky still put on a great show for us today, enough so
that we were chasing storms in one form or another for about 4 hours in the same region. Not only
that, but there were quite a few regions of hail- one of which we drove through that had pellets about
the size of a nickel.  As a member of hail retrieval duty today, however, I will be the first to tell you that
it feels a hail of a lot bigger when it falls out of the sky just to hit you in the head.

We chased the storms until the sun went down, and from there headed South to our reservations in
Norman, OK, content with a fruitful day’s hunt.  Tomorrow we will spend time in the morning to actually
visit the storm prediction center in Norman, and then after that the future is really ours.  Until next time,
I’ve been your humble bard.