The year 2024 offered a disproportionate number of late-twilight and nighttime wall clouds and tornadoes for me. I generally don’t seek to chase at night, but sometimes will continue from daytime if familiar with and confident in a storm’s morphology to safely route a viewing angle, with lightning behind the area of interest for illumination. In this case, the storms were slower to develop than forecast, in a high-CAPE, modest-shear setting, and we followed their backbuilding from the southwestern fringes of the OKC metro southwestward past Anadarko. Even though most of the storm-mode evolution was linear, occasionally the tail end of the line would stop growing just long enough to form a mesocyclone, in a favorably sheared setting for them. Twilight and faint lightning backlit this weakly to moderately rotating wall cloud, with a broad ground circulation evident in the direction of the spinning wind turbines. The nearest (right) was in southeasterly inflow, while the lit one was transitioning from southerly to northwesterly along the rear-flank gust front. As the circulation and a large core to its west were moving generally in our direction, we bailed southward, and the mesocyclone dissipated.
3 NE Stecker OK (4 Jun 24) Looking NNW
34.9857, -98.2658