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Storm Chase: February 10, 2009

Summary
First severe weather event of the 2009 chase season brought several supercells to central Oklahoma. We chased the last of them to the southwest of the line and encountered hail fog. However, due to severely-cooled inflow, our supercell of interest failed to produce. Tornadoes were reported in northwest OKC and Enid, OK.

Chase Team
Car 1: Nick Engerer (driver), Owen Shieh (navigator), Craig Schwartz
Car 2: Steve Mullens (driver)
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Hail Fog

After being storm-deprived for months, we were all itching to hit the road for the first chase of the 2009 season! The chase was rather close to home, as supercells formed just to the west and southwest of the OKC metro area. We pursued the last supercell of the line and followed it to Union City, OK where the other cells ahead of it had rapidly intensified.

KOUN base reflectivity at 3:30 pm CST is shown above. SRV at the same time is below.

We encountered a significant swath of small hail on the ground, which cooled the surface air just enough for fog to form. This was the first time any of us had seen hail fog in person! The hail was no doubt left behind from the other supercells just ahead of our storm.

While in the hail fog, we measured a temperature drop of 22 degrees F. With this cold inflow, it was no surprise that our supercell failed to intensify and slowly weakened. We chased the storm into the Yukon, OK area, then got heavily bogged down by traffic from OKC. We called off the chase shortly thereafter.

In the end, there were reported tornadoes in Enid as well as in the northwestern part of the OKC metro area. Enid was unreachable, and the OKC metro area was unchaseable.