April 26, 1991 - North Central Oklahoma Tornadoes

My chase career started off with a bang in 1982. I was able to see a couple of fairly impressive events. Mother Nature was quick to let me know just how hard this thing called stormchasing was... and from 1983 to 1990, I was handed only a few minor tornado events and many bust years.

With nine years of chase knowledge under my belt, better forecasts and tools on the road... 1991 seemed to be the turning point. This would be my first day ever dealing with a long-tracked violent tornado.

For several days in advance... computer models suggested that this day would be very active in the plains and a significant tornado outbreak was expected. David Andra and myself left the National Weather Service in Oklahoma City north and northwest to Hennessey. Thunderstorms began developing in the early afternoon just to our west and we made an attempt to keep up with them as they raced northeastward. These first storms of the day never became severe... moved well off of the dryline and we decided to position ourselves back to the west where new storms were forming north of Watonga and west of Enid.

Looking to the west of Loyal... explosive thunderstorm development was taking place. This was some of the most impressive early stages of storms that I had ever seen. The storms were moving very quick and we fell behind a bit driving through Enid. We were still stuck in Enid traffic when we heard the first reports of a tornado east of the city. The tornado was about mid-life when we caught up with it. Here it is as it was entering it’s rope stage.

Not long after the first tornado died... a new tornado quickly formed just to the east of Breckinridge. This tornado didn’t last long... but we were left with a strongly rotating thunderstorm and the feeling that the day was not over.

As the area of circulation approached Garber... a very small tornado occurred just west of the town. In this picture... a very narrow condensation core is seen just to the left of the trees. This event was made more interesting by the occasional baseball size hailstones that were falling around us. We also managed to get ourselves caught up in mesocyclone winds in Garber that did some nearby damage and gave us a little more excitement than we were expecting.

After collecting ourselves... we positioned in a perfect area to see the first of what would become called the Red Rock tornado. Here is the multi-vortex start of the tornado that destroyed a barn about a mile from us. Another image. The tornado became quite strong looking south of Billings and passed just to our north and northeast.

The storm was moving fast to the east-northeast and we were in a region of bad road options. We fell more and more behind the tornado as we tracked it to the northeast corner of Noble county. Our best view of the tornado as it became very large and violent was near I-35. There may have been a couple of things that we could have done better... but given 50 mph storm movements - I still believe that we did a pretty good job on the day.