April 22, 2004 - Haskell, OK Tornado

I didn’t really like the fact that chasing this day would take me once again into the trees and hills of eastern Oklahoma. But, the previous couple of days had me ready for anything out of a large city... no matter where it was. I did most of my data review after I hit the road. By the time I made it to Seminole county on I-40, it was becoming clear that portions of eastern Oklahoma had fairly high chances of some tornadoes.

I continued east on I-40 planning on hanging around the Henryetta area. When I got there... a severe thunderstorm was already moving out of Tulsa county into Rogers/Wagoner counties. Other storms were developing southwestward from Tulsa county into Okmulgee/Okfuskee counties. The convection looked good... and I decided to make a move north on highway 75 toward Okmulgee. A storm was now severe and had nice looking structure just to my north. This storm would soon have a radar-based tornado warning on it and I followed it into western Wagoner county near Coweta. Several times it had a wall cloud feature with weak to moderate rotation... but each time it appeared to get better... it would soon become disorganized again. This storm was smaller on radar than the tornado producing storm to the northeast. And, smaller than the tornado producing storm to the southwest that was now about 10 miles west of Haskell.

Based on the radar appearance and the fact that it wasn’t getting it’s act together... I made the decision to head southwest toward Haskell. Only one minute after I got to the town.... I noticed a funnel cloud to the southwest. I observed touchdown with this at 5:57 pm. Driving west of Haskell and looking to the south I shot video which these vid caps were taken from: ONE TWO THREE

The tornado was still on the ground when I started trying to find a better location for filming. It would come and go visually in rain that was wrapping around the circulation. I got another view of the tornado when it was near it’s largest stage. This image is a brief view to the west as I was moving south of town. The tornado only lasted about five minutes with about half of it’s life obscured by rain.

The storm continued to have some areas of moderate rotation in wall cloud features as it tracked eastward toward Taft and eventually Muskogee.