4:58 pm CDT – Looking northwest from 2.3 nm west northwest of Macomb, OK

One of the toughest decisions made on a storm chase is, what is the goal for the day?  More often than not, I am looking for a tornado.  So, the navigation around a storm usually keeps me with a pretty good view of the entire storm and especially the “business end” of the storm.  Sometimes the goal is lightning, it may be time lapse, it may be shooting views on the backside, but this day was dedicated to finding large hail.  What makes the decision hard is that once you commit to one of these options other than looking for a tornado, you have likely taken yourself out of position to see anything else.

I was please that things worked out like I expected.  Steep lapse rates, big instability and nice shear all pointed to this being a giant hail day.  Just before 5 pm, I positioned myself northwest of Macomb and watched as an explosive supercell developed over Lake Thunderbird.  My original thought was that the storm was young enough that I could let it pass over and then start following it looking for large hail stones.  Luckily, I got word that the large hail started almost immediately and I drove north and west to Pink – allowing the storm to skirt by me to my west and south.  I turned south on Dobbs Road (which leads to Etowah) and immediately started coming across large hail.

For the next 10 miles I measured hail of increasing size.  At 5:39 pm, I measured hail to 3.15″ – 5 miles north of Etowah:

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The biggest stone was found at 5:57 pm – one mile south of Etowah.  It measured 3.41″ which is the largest I have ever measured with a caliper.  I have measured 5″ hail before with a ruler, but just started using a caliper in 2008.

As mentioned earlier, once I committed to finding large hail, there wasn’t much left to do with the storms.  The backside was a nothing but a mass of gray with a steady light rain and occasional small hail stone.  It was a good first outing and nice, short start to my 39th season.