ELK CITY, Okla. — Storm chasers will regale others with their tales of 2024 for a long time. Photogenic tornadoes have twirled through the Plains by the dozen, and hardly a week has gone by without several high-end severe-weather events.
While some have been destructive and deadly, Thursday’s epic tornado in southwest Oklahoma was anything but. The twister outside the town of Eldorado — about 140 miles southwest of Oklahoma City — remained over mainly rural areas. Save for power poles and trees, there was little in the tornado’s path to hit.
Instead, it was the “ideal tornado,” if that’s a thing. Scientists surrounded it from all angles, probing it with drones, mobile radars and ground-based sensors to unravel its secrets. Storm chasers stalked it, careful to respect its capricious ferocity but daring to venture close enough to hear its angry roar.
On social media, chasers described it as “the single best tornado chase of my life,” “unbelievable,” “unforgettable,” “a beast,” “incredible,” a “monster” and “insane.” And researchers were able to collect a “lifetime data set,” or as one scientist put it, “the data of the decade.”
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I watched the tornado for roughly 30 minutes, comfortably planted in a field as it whirled hardly a quarter-mile away. It was among my easiest storm chases — and arguably, my best. Here’s what it was like.
The chase
The storm environment wasn’t terribly favorable for tornadoes. We knew that supercells, or rotating thunderstorms, would form in the afternoon in western Oklahoma and across much of the Texas Hill Country. They were expected to erupt along a “dryline,” or the leading edge of bone-dry desert air impinging on Gulf of Mexico moisture to the east.
At first glance, the environment seemed most conducive to very large hail. Forecasters at the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center said the hail could grow as large as 3.5 inches in diameter — or between baseball and softball size. The chance of tornadoes was lower, but ingredients came together for a memorable one.
The tornado
After several storms merged, a fiercely rotating thunderstorm took shape in southwest Oklahoma near the town of Gould, which is just to the north of Eldorado. It dropped tennis-ball-size hail, but its rotation was broad and not yet consolidated. Low-level winds were weak, meaning it would be difficult for the evolving column of rotation to spin robustly at ground level. Nonetheless, I positioned east of Gould.
Because a swarm of tornado chasers was congregating near the storm and there was a potential for traffic gridlock, I aimed to avoid the crowds. I drove out ahead of the storm on the grid-like dirt-road network, parked on a hill and climbed onto the tailgate of my truck. It was time to enjoy the view.
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The storm slowed down as it approached. An impressive wall cloud was forming about two miles to my west. That’s the visible manifestation of rotation as air spirals into the bottom of the storm. It seemed to be rotating much more profusely than the environment would support.
But here’s a guess as to what was happening: In the storm’s downdraft, rain-cooled air was sinking, but ahead of the storm, warm, moist air was rising. Those two air masses chaffed against each other, creating a horizontal tube of spin. The mesocyclone, a rotating updraft within the thunderstorm, probably began ingesting that spin and tilting it vertically, stretching it into a more concentrated vortex. That’s how the tornado probably happened.
It began as a bowl-shaped lowering of clouds with occasional ground circulations dancing beneath. Then it evolved into a powerful wedge-shaped tornado. Multiple vortexes orbited the twister’s center.
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Wary that the monster tornado might come too close, some storm chasers abandoned their spots, but I was confident that it would pass just to my south. I angled my vehicle toward a last-minute escape route, but held my ground as it slipped about 1,000 feet southeast. All the while, its angry growl sounded like a rushing waterfall.
Share this articleShareAs it progressed to the northeast, I drove alongside it, crossing a north-south highway and following dirt roads east. A second tornado briefly touched down to its north. Then the tornado morphed into a ghostly white stovepipe. At this point, it probably had winds over 200 mph.
The data
Researchers from a slew of academic institutions descended on this tornado in packs, dancing a strategically choreographed routine with various instrumentation.
Multiple mobile Doppler radar units — ultrasensitive weather radars mounted on trucks — scanned the tornado from close range.
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The University of Oklahoma’s RaxPol radar was on scene. So was the Center for Severe Weather Research’s Doppler on Wheels. In the tweet below, notice the detail of the imagery obtained, which reveals an eye-like feature at the core of the vortex:
Mobile radar data indicated winds of 210 mph just 630 feet above the ground.
The Observation of Tornadoes by UAV Systems (OTUS) project also flew three drones into the tornado. One has been recovered, and the other two have yet to be found.
Lots of other data was collected, too. It’s likely that this tornado will be the subject of academic discussions and writings for years to come. And for storm chasers on the ground, it was simply magical.
Amazing scenes of this tornado from other storm chasers
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