May 24,
2002 Pictures
This is one of the first storms that began to go up just west of Altus, OK. Some others off to the left and out of the picture wer down by Childress, TX and SW of Hollis. This storm went on to produce a small tornado by Cordell. It grew very rapidly.
This storm is just west of Hollis, OK. It had been trying to get it's act together for a while. It was competing somewhat with the storm to it's south. However, it had good clean inflow still at this point.
Here is the same storm, now with a little (and I mean little) lowering over the town of Gould, OK. Inflow was still strong and the storm was beginning to drift to the northeast a little more.
We finally headed up Hwy 34 toward Mangum as the circulation/lowering seem to organize a little farther north.
We are about five miles south of Mangum now with two areas of lowering, one to our southwest (this picture) and another directly to our west. Inflow winds really picked up at this point to around 25-30 mph and the lightning became very intense around us.
This is the storm we caught up with south of Cordell, OK. It was the one that produced a small tornado NW of Cordell, OK. I had a really good shot of this storm when it still had a lowering and circulation, but the picture was blurry. Within about a 20 minute timeframe this storm completely fizzled out and dissipated. However, as you can see from the next several images, we were left with a great sunset.
The best part of this whole chase was this sunset. These pictures don't do justice to how pretty it really was.