When I hit the road, I expected a less linear mode to dominate in Arkansas. Sure, northern Arkansas could do anything, but the rest should be fine because the deep-layer flow was hitting the boundary at this huge angle. So through the bulk of the afternoon it was nothing but northeast-southwest lines of convection with embedded cells. The most impressive thing was that despite high reflectivities, there were no warnings before 6pm.
I drove to Brinkley as planned and stopped for data. There was no reason to continue westward based on the radar. Everything was coming to me. The tornado watch finally came out at 5:30. At that point there were two lines of storms, another developing, and new discrete cells in southwestern Arkansas. That's when I became convinced I would run out of daylight. The individual cells maintained their non-linear mode all the way to Mississippi and were responsible for many of the day's reports.
I backed off on rt70 to avoid the diesels and all of that drama. The low clouds obscured most of the structure but what I could see was pretty soft. The anvils looked alright in the orange sunset, so I took some pictures with a field of mature cotton in the foreground. At least I got something. I eventually got back on I-40 to make time after dark. I avoided the worst of it, but a little before 7pm, the tor warnings began. One was almost where I had been parked two hours earlier. Naturally Shelby County was well-warned as the line approached. One tornado was "confirmed" near Clarendon and another near Jericho; the others were in Mississippi. All were after dusk.
I'm glad I went, but was disappointed in the storm's appearance. The 00z LZK raob showed skinny cape at 1000j/kg, BRN of 59, mlcape at 1020, srh of 235, and sfc-6km shear at 64kts. Flow was unidirectional above 1km. All in all, there were more good things than bad. I'm not clear on why only southern Arkansas had isolated cells.
