Friday, May 31, 2013, was the last chase day for the Tour 4 group.  We had had a very busy and successful six chase days, but we were still missing the nice “cherry on top” tornado.  We were in Ardmore, OK, and the outlook for severe weather and tornadoes looked pretty darn good later in the day, not too far away.

I almost elected to call off the chase or hope for something new and easy to catch later, in the western part of the severe watch box, but the storm towers to the east looked good and were not moving east too quickly.

There was another big cell to our west, near the border, and another one to the east, near Alpine. The Alpine storm looked to have a big area of precip with it, AND it was presumably closer to the really good moisture that was headed west along U.S. 90.

Why don’t they just say “…although an isolated tornado is possible”?   What SPC writes here is tantamount to saying that a tornado may or may not be possible.  A lot of good that does!  

So, despite my reservations, I put some trust in the models and drifted east from Cozad and towards the middle of eastern NE.  I was afraid of the strong cap over NE, and kept my eye on the area near the surface low near Valentine and Winner. 

The setup for severe weather was not especially clear cut, but a weak low pressure area associated with large values of CAPE was forecast from north-central SD northward into central ND. 

A very rewarding chase was had in northeastern Colorado, courtesy of a magnificent supercell that tracked east-northeastward right over Last Chance and through Washington County.

 This Baca County supercell had been in progress for four hours at least, but it had not produced a tornado in the previous two-and-one-half hours. Low-level rotation in the updraft base continued quite hard. I knew that the cell might indeed produce another tornado, but I certainly was not expecting one.

Today we woke up pretty much where we needed to be — in Midland, TX.  A boundary was oriented WSW-ENE a little north of I-20 from Monahans to Midland.  With plenty of sun, instability and moisture, it appeared that tornadic supercells might develop near the front during the afternoon. 

This was the second-to-last full chase day for Tour 5, which up to this point had been quite successful, with supercell intercepts on seven consecutive days.  We had yet to be close to a photogenic tornado, and today offered a decent chance at that. 

Crazy, crazy, crazy chase period from May 22 to May 24!  I saw five tornadoes on the 22nd in NW KS, two on the 23rd in SW KS, and then ten or more in NC OK on the 24th.  On the 24th we picked up the Tour 3 folks in OKC, got on the road northbound at 1 p.m., and were on the prolific tornadic storm in Garfield County (east of Enid) in one hour.