At the outset, things looked pretty interesting for today, with good instability ahead of a cold front and dry line across about the southern half of the state. Initially, Tom and I were fairly confident in the days prospects as it looked and felt like a chase day, with high dewpoints, lots of low clouds streaming north and the like. It's been rare the past few years to see days like this early in the season. This time last year we were dealing with snow. 

 Ch9 gave us a target town of Blanchard. Wasn't to thrilled with that as I would have preferred to be further west, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. Tom and I grabbed a quick BBQ sammich from Rudy's then headed down Hwy 9 to the thriving metropolis of Blanchard. We decided to cheat a little and head further southwest, eventually finding a nice spot between Blanchard and Tabler that gave a good view to the west and southwest. Soon after we pulled in, fellow chase pal Terry Kern zipped on by, destination unknown. We hung out for awhile, pretty bored, but glad to see the low clouds break somewhat and allow heating to take place. A local cop pulled up to check on things and see if their dog training class would be washed out. Not likely, I told him. We waited some more and decided to pull up a radar and see if anything might be going on. Zoiks! A small but strong storm was showing up just to our northwest...we had noticed the anvil but thought it was just more of the mid and high level clouds that were passing over. We decided to head towards Chickasha and see if we could get a view of it. A few miles outside of town we caught a glimpse of the updraft. It was nice, but the cell had that high based look to it...just as we noticed that, the phone rang. It was Carrie from the station.." Gary wants you guys to head back to Blanchard and stay put." Glumly, we did as told, as other cells fired up just to the north. We soon came to realize these were indeed high based storms and didn't feel so bad about not heading after them. We did hear of a few small hail reports in parts of OKC, but nothing to get worked up about. We came back into town and stopped at the Sonic, I grabbed some tasty fries and Tom got a sundae. This chasing thing sure is rough! Anyway, we hung out there for awhile, waiting for the real storms to develop. We could see more towers going up to the southeast, but these were also high based and remained below severe limits. We eventually removed ourselves from the safety of the Sonic overhang to pull about a block away in a nice open space with a view to the west. By that time, many of the low clouds had dissipated leading us to believe the dry line was surging eastward. After a look at data we realized instead the winds were veering as drier, southwesterly winds mixed down from above. Our dewpoints dropped into the low 50's. Not a good sign. We were mortified. Well, not really, but pretty bummed. As the low clouds cleared we could see the trailing high based cells to the north. A few small towers, if you want to call them that, struggled upwards just to our north as the drier air pushed east. These too, met a slow death soon after. There was an interesting deck of mid level clouds that made for a few nice pics, of which I thought these would be the only I take all day. Tom and I were already wanting to call it a day, but the boys at the station wanted us to hold position. So it then became nap time, for the most part. After awhile, a rather tough looking local in a very orange shirt pulled up. Oh great. Probably a Ch4 fan who wants to kick our ass. Turns out he was a local spotter just wanted to see what was up.

 We did notice that there were still towers and low clouds not to far to our southeast, which intrigued us only a bit. However, before to much longer we noticed a boundary pushing back to the northwest. At about the same time, we could see a line of congestus off to the west and northwest as storms struggled to get going along the cold front in the drier air. As the boundary pushed in closer to us, the low clouds and small towers moved closer as well. Gary called a little while later and we discussed what the boundary could be. At first we thought it might be an outflow boundary from earlier high based cells to the southeast, but there hadn't really been enough of them to make such a boundary. We concluded it must be the deeper moisture pushing back west as the upper storm approached , causing  the mid level and low level winds to back to a more southerly direction. Gary asked us to drop south and transect the boundary to see what kind of temperature change there was along it. On the north side of Blanchard where we were, the temperature was 75° . By the time we reached a mile or two south of Blanchard the temperature was up to 81°. We crossed the boundary just south of Dibble. The temperature dropped to 78° and it was noticeably more humid. Towers were now more impressive along this boundary and it was starting to look like we might see a storm after all. We headed back north, crossed over the boundary again and reported back to the telly boys. Another note of interest...each time we crossed the boundary, we ran into numerous bugs that now adorned the windshield and made viewing rather gooey.

 Soon after crossing to the north of the boundary, we could see several towers were developing rapidly just south of Dibble, so we found a spot in town to watch. We were surprised to see a nice line of towers from the northeast to southwest, with the most vigorous growth just a few miles to the south. Growth wasn't explosive, but rapid enough that we knew we would be chasing a storm very soon. The cells were very slow moving, so we were able to stay put and enjoy the show for once. Eventually, the cell just to the south anviled out, with light veils of precip noted just to the east. The bases were fairly low, but somewhat linear. We were preparing to head east when we noticed our cells updraft had weakened, but another just to the southwest was taking off. At first, we did head east a few miles, hoping to keep both cells in view. We ran into some large rain drops in town, where I finally saw the store my old produce boss owned. About 3 miles east of town, we received word yet another cell had formed further to the southwest and looked much better. We could see a rain free base to the southwest, but it was quickly becoming obscured by the precip from our second cell just to the southwest. I was getting concerned about all the cells so close together, but I was more excited about the prospects of rootin' tooton' storms.

 We dropped back south on Hwy 76, south of Dibble and lost a good view of the storm thanks to the terrain, but about 8 or 9 miles south of Dibble, we could see a large lowering, but no rotation. A new core was developing rapidly just southwest of this lowering as a new storm exploded along the line. We found a county road that actually had a good view and pulled over. We were very disappointed to see this had already turned into a small line of storms. There was a nice wall cloud to our north, under the updraft of the newer cell, but outflow was already cutting under it, along with the other storms in the line. We couldn't believe how rapidly the outflow took over. It was like chasing a summer system. We hung out for a bit and watched with dismay as the line built to the west. We dropped into Lindsay, ready to call things off, but a storm that was nearing Purcell, to the northeast,  was showing signs of breaking away from the line and actually had some rotation with it. At first, we tried to head towards  it, but were told to pretty much hold our position, just in case similar things happened back to the west. It was probably a good idea as the storm was moving near 50mph. I hate these early season systems sometimes.

 We stopped again south of Criner, with a full blown squall line in progress now. It was mostly weak, with a few embedded stronger cells, but overall nothing to write home about. Or maybe even write in this blog about. There were a few picture ops as the shelf cloud moved in, but that was about it. A new core developed rapidly in the line to our north and we decided to try and get into it and look for hail, so we went north to Hwy 39 then east. We encountered very heavy rain east of Criner and a few tings of pea size hail, but that was about it. We followed the storms until we reached Purcell, where we stopped and watched as the shelf cloud passed overhead, which did make for some nice pictures. We hung out for awhile as the cold front was just about to collide with the line of storms we had been trailing. We thought this might enhance them a bit, but not really. After about 20 minutes we were given the green light to head home, fortunately just a short drive away. On the way back we came through a heavy core of a severe storm near Lexington. We did see a lot of hail on the ground and received some small hail, up to dime size. There was a report of golf ball size hail in the area, but we never saw any evidence of it. After that, we drowned our sorrows in a large pizza with extra sauce when we got home. So much for my diet.

 The day wasn't quite what was expected. There were a lot of storms with hail and wind, including one supercell near and east of Wichita Falls that dropped up to softball size hail. The only tornadoes reported were in the Little Rock, AR area, with at least one of them an EF2. There was a lot of damage around the city, but fortunately no fatalities and only a few injuries.