The Setup
There longwave trough, which was responsible for a couple days with apparently stronger tornado potential, was continuing slowly east through the United States. There was another chance to see storms with this same trough today. However, since it had more of a positive tilt, and cold high pressure was working its way southward through the plains, we were chasing ahead of a cold front. This limited our tornado potential, but if a storm could become rooted ahead of the front, there was enough CAPE and shear to make things interesting. We planned to work our way along the Mississippi River as far as we could until it was necessary to break for southwestern Arkansas and getting us into position for the next day.
The Chase
We found some storms we could target, but interactions among storms, along with an advancing cold front, made intercepts rather difficult. We had some storms pass by in northeastern Arkansas, and the cell we were targeting became undercut, but when the low clouds cleared a bit, we could see a nice wall cloud type feature near Weiner, Arkansas. Even though it was in cooler air, it had an interesting shape, so we gave our photography tour guests a chance to photograph it for a few minutes.
We then went for other storms farther southwest in (hopefully) less rain-cooled air. It was a long drive southwestward on Interstates 40 and then 30 through Little Rock into southwestern Arkansas. However, the traffic moved pretty fast, especially the semi-tractor trailer trucks, and the road was littered with retread tire fragments from these trucks. This chaos made the drive go by a little faster.
Finally, we found our storm near Prescott, AR, but the core crossed the road in front of us, and we couldn't get ahead of it. By this time, it was sunset, so we stopped to enjoy the colors. We continued to Hope to stay the night.
Wrap-up
Another chase were it was difficult to find a good storm in clean air that we could stay with. Our expectations were not that high since we knew there were a few unfavorable factors for our storm chase, but it would have been nice to be in front of something for a while.