One of a long series of erratically moving tornadoes produced by the “Cole-Shawnee” supercell, this fourth of the surveyed “Etowah” tornadoes was briefly one of the best-defined visually, manifesting as a genuine wedge in the deep woods of extreme eastern Cleveland County. Given the wobbly and often strongly deviant motions of this storm’s mesocyclones and accompanying tornadoes, I kept good distance, especially after sunset. To this day I don’t know exactly how many tornadoes I saw with this storm, given respectful distance, their unsteady behavior, path overlaps in time, and sometimes nebulous visual forms. For one of the few times since the daylight Cole tornado, this vortex’s appearance at this stage was definitely not nebulous! Lighting, however, was much dimmer than apparent here. As four years earlier in southwestern Kansas, I was able to do a short time exposure at high ISO and wait for a fortuitous lightning flash — in this case, both in the background core and overhead — to illuminate landscape and silhouette the tornado, then let the shutter shut. The entire supercell would move farther from me and my position in a driveway at the eastern dead end of York Rd., with nothing but denser forest and choppier hills to the NE. Given that, and a newer supercell behaving even more drunkenly to its west, I called off the chase shortly after this, and moved cautiously northward and homeward.
5 ENE Lexington OK (19 Apr 23) Looking NE
35.0441, -97.2538