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)
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