Day 8 Chase 5 Summary

Damage Path, Hail, Tornadic Supercells

Mt. Pleasant, TX to Hope, AR to Malvern, AR to Conway, AR to Perry, AR to Perryville, AR to Bryant, AR to Malvern, AR (overnight)


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On a day when 21 people were killed by a large area of storms and tornadoes, it seems somewhat churlish to bemoan an opportunity missed on our chase.

We were chasing around central/western Arkansas, where the terrain was not conducive to easy and/or safe chasing. The roads are winding, and there are a lot of trees and hills. Our worse nightmare would be to crest a hill and see a large tornado coming toward us on he other side.

We came into Arkansas in the mid morning, and stopped at Hope for an assessment on data. The day was very hazy, and very hot. Guidance from SPC was that tornado warnings were in place over most of Arkansas, eastern OK, and NE Texas.

The problem for us (and all the other chasers) is that as mentioned above, this is poor chase territory, and these supercell storms were going to be running ESE at around 50 miles per hour, so keeping up with them would be tricky. Our best bet would be to locate to the SE of the path of one of these storms when they fired and hope to catch something as the storm ripped through.

The area north of us at Hope was very hilly, so we went further up the I-30 toward Little Rock so we had more options to cut north. Storms were now firing in East OK, and were looking very intense. They were also coming into north AR, hence our desire to have an option to head north. We stopped at Malvern for another check on data.

We decided to try and get up to Russelville area by cutting north over the hills. We would hopefully get up there before these big storms in Eastern OK crossed over into AR. Sadly GPS gave us the runaround, and we ended up back on the I-30 having missed our route straight north. We continued up I-30 and onto I-430, onto the I-40 headed north-west to try and intercept the storm directly west of Conway with a view to cutting back south-west to get to the tornadic supercell line coming into AR.

By now there were 10 Tornado warned storms, with the line coming in from the west all having tornado warnings on them.

At Conway, we pulled over to see what the cell coming in from the west was up to. There was some lightning associated with it, but it wasn't springing into life as we had hoped. We pushed west and then south to Perry, back into the hilly stuff, with the intention of cutting back south-west to intercept the tornado-warned supercells coming from the west.

As we were coming round the I-40 toward Morniton, it became obvious that things were erupting over the hills south of Perry and Perryville - right across our planned route. We checked it out on GRLevel3 - and were informed that this supercell was chucking down 3" hail, easily enough to bust a windscreen and leave us stuck in remote country. In Perry we spotted a closed gas station with a roof over the pump area, so we pulled in to ride out the hail before pushing onward. This storm was also exhibiting rotation, with about 4 meso areas around its south eastern flank, and a pronounced hook signature forming. We really needed to get south so we could have a look at this thing where all the action was occurring.

The north-west area of the storm rolled over us, with rain then hail. To our surprise and dismay the hail was fairly minor - only 1/2" at best - we could have easily punched this and carried on. As it was, we had lost a good 20 minutes - which was to prove decisive.

We carried on past Williams Junction, onward to Paron. At this point the inevitable happened - the storm became tornado warned with a confirmed funnel on the ground west of Hurricane Lake - some 20 miles to our south-east. The roads were winding, so we couldn't risk going any faster. We then came across large amounts of debris on the road north of Benton - large tree branches and foliage which we obviously had to slow down for. This may have just been straight line wind damage, but having check later on the tornado's path, we were in the right area for where it first hit the ground - but we were 20 minutes too late.

If we'd have punched the hail core at Perry then we may have been in the game for chasing this tornado, but by now it was through Alexander into the Shannon Hills, east of which the river would have blocked all further chasing, and the whole system was moving ESE at 50mph. According to reports, it carried on ESE all the way to Stuttgart AR - a track of some 70 miles.

With daylight fading, we decided to head back SW on the 30 to try and catch the supercells coming in from OK. But it just wasn't going to be our day - the cells on the northern end of the line that would have headed into a chasable area were fading, with the main action far to the south-west, near the Texas border, which was an hour and a half away. These cells were still dropping funnels, and there were multiple reports of tornadoes that evening and overnight.

Looks like this was out last chase day - very frustrating, considering what was going on today, but we came pretty close!