Even when you set aside a month in which your window for chasing storms seems flexible and endless, you can miss stuff, and boy, did we miss stuff the week before we headed to the Plains for the 2024 chase. It didn’t help that I had work obligations and my chase co-pilot Alethea Kontis made a whirlwind trip to South Korea. And thus we missed a week of epic tornadoes. But May 6 looked promising, so we headed out from Florida to catch the action — even if it looked like the action would die off soon afterward.
The Storm Prediction Center’s “high risk” outlook inspired dread.
They weren’t exactly wrong. There were tornadoes, including one before dark, wrapped in rain, that some storm chasers saw. But most of the tornadoes were after dark, including a terrible one in the Bartlesville area. Yet this wasn’t a day of many rampaging tornadoes, fortunately for Oklahoma, and we didn’t see one.
While we looked at pretty features, we were out of position on a tornado that formed farther northeast.
That doesn’t mean we weren’t concerned about the day as it began, as you can see in the video. But instead of a high-stress chase, what we got was classic rotating storms forming on the dryline in the Texas Panhandle and pushing into Oklahoma. They weren’t moving all that fast, and we had a satisfying chase as we observed pretty convection and tried to pick the right cell. And after dark, we were treated to a beautiful lightning show.
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