A powerful early season Pacific trough gave us the first chase opportunity of 2007 this day.  Most chasers – including ourselves – had been forecasting for this system for the past ten days or more, and it was finally here.  The setup looked less than perfect, and although this same system produced tornadoes in the Texas Panhandle on the previous day – moisture profiles looked less than profound. 

On the evening of February 23^rd, Jason and I watched our breezes switching southerly keenly – but our air was still bone dry.  We sat out on our front porch at night and – instead of enjoying the moist return flow – sat huddled up in winter coats.  NOT a good premonition for the night before chase day!  At 3.00am on the morning of the 24^th, we were woken up by spectacularly bright lightning and muffled thunder – more than likely as a result of obscured anvil crawlers overhead.  Our return flow had arrived, with numerous elevated thunderstorms forming on the nose of the LLJ. 

Given that we were unable to chase the cold core setup on the 24^th (central KS is a bridge too far for these chasers in late February!), we prepared for an early, fast chase and were looking forward to the opportunity of ironing out any creases in our new laptop/equipment (as it were – there were very few).  By 9.00AM we headed out with the mindset of positioning somewhere with WiFi in Lonoke.  The drive south and east on I-40 was a wet one amidst the constant thundershowers – a theme that seemed poised to take over the entire day.  We hoped for some good chasing east or southeast from Little Rock today – in the Arkansan Plains. 

We arrived in Lonoke around 9.40AM after battling our way there through the ridiculous southerly gales.  The drive had been dizzying trying to keep your eyes on the road while the gray strato-cu raced against the equally gray sky.  Lonoke was dry – being out ahead of the line – but this didn’t last long.  A quick search of Lonoke turned up some free WiFi and we stayed there for the rest of the morning watching data.  Around 11.00AM the thunderstorms caught up with us – making it a very wet wait-out for mother nature.  February.  Yuck.  The new SWODY1 was issued and stayed almost exactly the same, and SPC later issued an MCD with a hand-drawn area of extreme southeastern AR and northeastern LA at highest risk for tornadoes.  The was due to the greater instability – Tds in this region were broadly in the 60s whereas across most of the rest of AR they were struggling in the 50s. 

1.00PM came and we grabbed some lunch on the go on our way southeast – Jason had expressed a desire to reposition to Stuttgart to at least be a little nearer the favorable chase conditions.  Besides – two lines of storms to our west delineated the pre-frontal trough and the dryline respectively.  We drove east on I-40 for a short time and noticed that the strato-cu was breaking up into rolls, almost giving us sight of blue sky above but not quite.  The winds still ripped at the van as we took the Hazen exit and went south on Hwy 86 to Stuttgart in Arkansas county.  After exiting off the tree-lined interstate, it was extremely interesting to see the landscape give way to rolling Plains that the Texas Panhandle would be proud of.  Vast green and brown fields dotted with grain silos and irrigation equipment reminded me that Arkansas’ hidden gem may not be it’s diamonds in the rough but it’s pristine chase territory that nobody ever admits is there.

We found WiFi at the Super 8 in Stuttgart just as the whole county apparently became socked-in with rain around 1.35PM.  Intense thunderstorms on the northern end of the most significant line in the state were bringing battering rain and wind as we sat gathering data.  We could see nothing, except on radar.  All around us was grayness and rain.  Never makes for a good chase day. 
After perusing data it became apparent that the only area with any potential in the whole state was – as we had feared all along – going to be in the extreme southeastern portion of the state.  A very intense line of more cellular storms was moving into the counties of Ashley and Drew in Arkansas, and a tornado-warned cell was just crossing the border.  It was a tail-end-charlie of sorts and the warning text stated that funnels and tornadoes with this storm had been sighted.  It also stated that the cell motion was between 65 and 75mph to the northeast.  Gawd.

Jason decided to make a dash for it and see if we could get down there in time.  It looked unlikely but we decided to give it a go.  Leaving Stuttgart around 1.55pm, we headed south of town on Hwy 165 to undertake our tortuous journey.  Our road to the southern tornado-warned storm was through many of the less intense, messy, squally, rainy storms that were north of it.  We drove as fast as the conditions would allow (60mph was really it), and even at that the roads became hydroplaning risks with standing water collecting in the ruts.  The southerly wind, coupled with blowing heavy rain and the high winds being mixed down to the surface by the storms made it slow going.  Soon Hwy 165 turned hard left, signaling our westerly jaunt towards the city of De Witt, AR.  We were in Arkansas county.  The weather radio was churning out tornado warnings for our target cell constantly, as this was the only source of data we had for the upcoming intercept, and it put the cell around Monticello in Drew county and it was closing fast on Dumas – our target town.  The problem with cells moving at 70mph, however, is that by the time you hear a warning stating where the cell is going to be at a certain time – it is already well on it’s way to being there, if not actually there already.  We reached De Witt and turned south for our last sprint towards Dumas at around 2.35PM.  I had hauled the Rand McNally out of the backseat and was tracing projected paths for the storm from the information I could decipher from the weather radio.  On it’s current projected path, I calculated that the tornado would possibly pass just north of Dumas and cross our road shortly thereafter.

Passing through Gillett we saw some intense inter-cloud lightning on the backside of what we could only assume was the tornadic storm’s anvil.  We were still flying south, but it was no use.  We pulled the reigns on our chase about two miles north of Black

Gate AR and sat up on the shoulder of the highway.  The warnings on the radio, along with our own eyes, told us that we had been beaten to Dumas by the beast.  Not only that – but staying where we were was putting ourselves in unnecessary danger from a storm whose probable-tornado was southwest of us, wrapped in rain and barreling towards us at 70mph.  We wheeled around and – with the increasing feeling that “something” was in close proximity in the midst of our pseudo-hurricane – we fled north of Gillett again and waited until warnings on the radio confirmed damage in Dumas and that the storm was now near Back Gate and headed east of our highway.  We took an exploratory jaunt along the easterly road towards Tichnor, but there was nothing of interest to see except a very convincing looking scud bomb that loomed out of the mist at us.

Having given our all amidst the spray and rain and wind and zero visibility, we turned north for good and decided to head home while listening to the damage reports starting to come out of Dumas.  Stopping in Gillett for the restroom we actually found a WiFi signal that would download a radar image for us.  This showed us that the Dumas storm was still very intense and rocketing off across the river, and that the cells north in the line (towards us) were intensifying rather rapidly.  It was time to get out of this mess.

The only other notable event this afternoon happened to us west of De Witt.  While driving on the leg of the road that heads west, we entered a particularly intense rain core.  Once inside this, the winds picked up drastically from the south, blasting north.  Our visibility was reduced to zero, and Jason slowed the van to 30mph to keep us on the road while we got blown across the highway.  Suspicious-looking spray wafted north across the embankments of our highway, making the road run like a river and covering our windshield with a film of flat water that made it impossible to see through except the half-millisecond after the wipers had passed over the surface.  We estimate that winds crossing our highway on this portion of the chase to have been between 70 and 80mph. 

With knuckles turning a hint of white, we then suddenly experienced a slight clearing of the precipitation, allowing us to look around.  Jason thought he saw a low base directly to our southwest in the field, I on the other hand looked north and distinctly picked up on what I thought was defined curtains of rain in the field to our north.  Funnily enough, not a word was said inside our vehicle.  It was, in fact, deathly quiet.  I didn’t want to rattle the driver any more than entirely necessary, and Jason sure as hell didn’t want to tell me (the bag-o’-nerves) that he thought he saw a base right over us. 

I clenched my teeth as we plowed westwards.  The bend in the road – the turn north that would take us out of this mess once and for all – was coming up.  We both heard a few clicks of hail on the windshield, and then almost as suddenly our vehicle was bathed in milky light as we rounded the rear of our “feature” (let’s just call it a “feature”).  I’ll be damned……an RFD. 

The rest of the drive was uneventful apart from passing a police officer flying south towards Dumas with their lights flashing.  By the time we made it up to England, AR we were bathed in refreshing post-frontal sunlight.  Looking back southeast, all that was visible of our storms was a thin haze and some modest cumulus.  The Dumas tornado may as well have been spawned by stratus.

All writings and imagery contained within this site are subject to all applicable Federal Copyright Law and are © Karen E. Leszke, 2007.
 

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