amarillo's where i'll be.

i am sitting on a hotel bed in amarillo texas, with three of my chase mates, playing the only three amarillo songs i know on youtube. this is day 3 of the chase, and we have covered approximately 1600 miles so far. day one consisted of driving from starkville to western oklahoma in hopes of some good storms. an early set of storms (not predicted by the models) formed, though we still hoped that an outflow boundary would form out ahead, and we could still have a chance of seeing something. the storms formed an MCS, and all the rainfall stabilized the environment and the associated cloud cover didn't let it recharge. we did drive through some heavy rain and saw some cool lightning as we navigated our way through oklahoma city, but all in all, day one ended up a dead end.

we ended up in weatherford, oklahoma for the night. the next day we packed up early and headed south. we set up in a park just across the red river in texas. after killing a couple of hours, a dry line moved into the area and storms began firing. we loaded the van and took off after a storm back in oklahoma, searching for some large hail. the storm was slow moving and had a weaker inflow, and died not long after we reached it. another storm just to the west was looking good, so we drove to antler, oklahoma, to try and core punch it. we got a couple of hailstones, but it was mostly gone by the time we turned back around to find more hail. storms in that area were just not sustaining themselves well yesterday. we drove north and spent the night in mcalester, texas (no tea, i wanted some though, because all i could think about was mcalisters). we saw some cool lightning as we walked to a chilis next to our hotel, though.

day 3 started with a lecture on splitting storms and hodographs, and then we loaded up and drove west. we spend the majority of the day on the road, and we ended up in amarillo. we have a couple of off days before things start getting active again, so tomorrow we are spending the day exploring a canyon and going to the big texan. i also might get the chance to see an old friend. more than likely, we'll spend tomorrow night in amarillo too, and then we'll start making our way north again. hopefully this time we make it out of the states of oklahoma and texas. :)