4/22/11: Wild skies in Norman's backyard

  When I came out of OU's Huston Huffman Fitness Center, affectionately called the Huff, after a Friday afternoon workout and heard a rumble of thunder, I turned and saw a massive tower already formed to the east.  Within minutes I was behind the wheel with my roommate John thumbing through the Oklahoma atlas in the passenger seat.  Noticing some rotation in the storm on radar, roughly around Pink (near the Cleveland-Pottawatomie county line), we took off eastward on OK-9 out of Norman.  As we did so, OUN tornado-warned the storm.

  We needed to get south on back roads, because OK-9 bends north on the east side of Lake Thunderbird.  The terrain east of Norman is crappy for chasing, but we came to an open spot on Etowah Road and stopped.  We were at the very back of the storm, either behind the updraft base or directly under it; cloud motions overhead were erratic with short-lived rotation discernible in various places, making me a little nervous at times.  On a side note, look at the surroundings here.  We're only about a 15-minute drive from the Norman area, yet in the middle of nowhere!  That's the nature of the OKC metro.

  We knew we must be in the right area because a news helicopter began circling near our position, close enough that we waved (although they probably didn't see us).  In central Oklahoma, news stations actually send out choppers in search of aerial views of tornadoes, resulting in amazing footage (look up some video from 3 May 1999) and street-by-street updates.  Viewers didn't get much to look at on this day, and as far as the storm goes, neither did we.  It moved on east and a linear storm with heavy rain and hail moved rapidly up from the south-southwest to merge with it, cutting off any route to the southern side of the storm.  We drove back and forth on country roads, encountering tiny hail once, before I realized I needed gas.

  The real show in the sky began in Macomb, OK.  With rain spitting from the southern storm, John held my umbrella while I took photos of the setting sun under an increasingly stunning mammatus display.

  Still running low on gas, we stopped at a Sinclair station in Macomb, the only game in town.  The store was flooded from an overflowing toilet, and some unrelated malfunction had left them unable to take credit or debit cards.  Note to self:  Always have cash (and for that matter, a full tank to start with) when leaving on a chase. Despite the fuel situation, we stopped under breathtaking skies on the west side of Macomb.

  Figuring there would be gas along OK-9, we rolled north toward it.  I eased up and coasted down the rolling hills of rural central Oklahoma under still-spectacular mammatus that gradually appeared across the entire sky.  Finally, the road we were on opened up to OK-9, and there sat a Sinclair station.  This station was having a much better day than its sister in Macomb, and we wound up with more than gas from the stop--I shot the mammatus in dying light from the far end of the parking lot.

  This mini-chase impressed on me that I have a lot to learn.  At the back of that storm, I didn't know exactly what I was seeing in some places.  It wasn't a classic supercell structure, but I still need to be able to figure out what's going on when I'm that close to an area of rotation.  The storm itself wasn't the day's highlight though--it was the mammatus at sunset, which blanketed the sky all the way back to Norman and had students on campus taking pictures on camera phones.  I wished I was a professional photographer, so I could approach doing justice to what I can only describe as a work of art.  "Praise the Lord from the earth...lightning and hail, snow and clouds, stormy winds that do his bidding." (Psalm 148)

4/14/11: Tornadoes in the SE OK hills

  Thursday, April 14, 2011, was an explosive storm day across the state of Oklahoma from I-35 east.  We got a late start due to classes, but headed out just as storms initiated on the dryline about 3:20 CDT.  In my car were my friends and fellow OU SoM freshmen Tim and Dana, and Michael, a friend I met at church.  Trying to get back ahead of the dryline, which was right overhead, we raced east on OK-9 out of Norman into some light precip from a strong storm that was being born right on top of us.  Three of our friends passed through the edge of that storm less than an hour later and reported some rotation in it.

   Storms had initiated both far to the north, well out of range and running away from us to the northeast, and to our south near Ardmore.  The Ardmore storm quickly mushroomed into a monster and was tornado-warned as we traveled.  We took US-377 south out of Seminole, our original target, to make a play on the southern storm.  It became clear as we headed south that the storm's heaviest precip, likely including damaging hail, would beat us to Ada, OK, so we cut back west on OK-39 to maneuver around the back of the storm and come up at it from the south.  Our first interesting sideshow of the day was on OK-39 just east of Konawa, where a farmer in a beat-up Buick was poking along at about 15-20 mph.  Why?  A big black cow was trotting down the opposite shoulder!  Fortunately the bovine took a detour through a barbed-wire fence (not a very good one apparently) and the farmer pulled off at that point.  Welcome to Oklahoma--tornadoes and renegade cows.

  OK-39 brought us to Asher, where we went south on US-177.  About that time, however, radar began to show a second storm behind the first big cell strengthening and closing the gap between them.  To get south of both storms, we realized we would have to slip southeast through Ada on OK-3 in between the two storms' cores.  We cut over from US-177 to OK-3 just south of Asher, in the process passing through an intersection in the absolute middle of nowhere where people with buckets were trying to take donations for some church.  We must have been about the third car they'd seen all day from the way they reacted to seeing us come over the rise.

   We slowed down in some hard rain just northwest of Ada to be sure the first storm's hail core was gone before moving into town.  A large area of very heavy rain was visible at the west and northwest side of the storm, bulging out at the bottom because of RFD winds.  We passed through Ada, which is a bigger place than you'd expect, in full sunlight, and saw a complete double rainbow that both began and ended in a field next to the road.

 
   Right after this gorgeous sight, things turned a bit scary.  We entered the narrowing gap between the two storms; skies around us turned almost black, and winds picked up significantly.  As the storms began to interact with one another, it was hard to tell which was closer.  A greenish tint appeared in the sky just to our west in the vicinity of Stonewall, and we knew if we didn't get out soon there would be hail.  I think I was probably speeding a bit through this area, but all the police we passed seemed more interested in the storms.  Finally, light skies appeared ahead of us to the south, and we broke out of the precip and worst of the wind just east of Tupelo, OK.

   We dropped south of that leading storm into Coalgate, OK.  Hesitating for a few minutes due to the ominous black sky ahead, we headed north and then northeast on OK-31 and OK-131.

  After stopping to watch the sky briefly, we moved on under the southern edge of the storm and turned up a farm road.  We believe we saw a funnel touch down on the top or far side of a distant hill, but it was too far off to know for sure.

  From there, we continued up OK-131 and stopped atop a large hill in the vicinity of Wardville, OK.  The first storm was drawing in the one behind it, beginning to rotate strongly in the process.  I took video of the well-defined base as rotation tightened.  This marked the first time I had ever seen scud visibly rising straight into the base of a storm.  A decal-plastered SUV full of spotters/chasers pulled up, and the men who jumped out kept exclaiming something about a wedge as they pointed to a distant precip shaft far from the updraft area; fortunately, from looking at SPC reports, it appears they didn't call in their phantom "wedge."  For some reason, my camera kept refocusing, ruining my video, but some still frames from it show what we saw.  Suddenly the scud fingers, wall cloud, and cloud base all spun into what looked for all the world like a wide tornado.  The terrain made it impossible to say for certain that the funnel touched down, but the image is convincing.  This wedge shape persisted less than a minute.

This was the highlight of the day for us.  While we don't know for sure that the funnel reached the ground on the far slope of the hill, it looks a heck of a lot like a big twister.  When it came to the top of the ridge, any number of the little funnels underneath the wall cloud were probably on the ground. 

  This was what we came for--spectacular rotating storms dropping tornadoes miles from anything they could damage.  The meso occluded just as the base moved out of view, and from that remote area our chase went downhill quickly, thanks to a huge navigational mistake I made.  We took OK-63 northeast from Kiowa, trying to stay with this storm even though it was perceptibly weakening.  That road is incredibly long and is lined with trees all the way--some of which had dropped thick branches along a stretch of a couple hundred yards where strong winds must have come through.  It took us all the way out past McAlester, with no other road options off of it, and effectively ended our chase.  Had we stopped at Kiowa to watch the first storm pass on, and then moved south on US-69, we could have been in position to see the Tushka-Atoka tornado.  After seeing its aftermath, however, it might be for the best that we missed it.  None of us have any desire to see a town wiped out and people killed, and there were already more than enough spotters on the storm to call in reports and help with rescue operations.  The residents of Tushka are in my prayers.

  We chose not to attempt a risky nighttime intercept of the back side of that monster storm as it crossed the Indian Nation Turnpike south of us (good call, as a tornado was reported crossing the turnpike), and instead got back to Norman around 11:30.  Except for the OK-63 fiasco, it was a very good chase--and from everything we could see, our first tornado day.