Today’s storm chase was slightly frustrating and funky; as predicted tornadoes broke out across southern Kansas and exploded south across a dry line in the I-35 corridor through Oklahoma throughout the day. For various reasons I didn’t chase into Oklahoma City, but I hung around the Norman area, thought I had missed my chance, then got hit by massive inflow and suddenly saw a tornado attempting to form right across the highway. It spun around a bit, but never got to the ground–at around the same time another tornado was spinning through northern Norman, part of which was caught on tape from a helicopter (which is awesome, it’s a tiny spindly thing that goes down this suburban road and basically pulls along this white van for hundreds of feet like it was a tonka toy).
That was what my whole day was like; the storms were firing up north to south, so every time I’d head south towards Texas I’d run into one tornado-warned cell after another, which was kind of my plan to begin with. But I kept being just slightly behind, just slightly missing a tornado or seeing something that might develop into one that never happened.
A second line also started to form in southern Oklahoma–instead of chasing the first line, I decided to wait for the second just east of Ardmore. There was a notch hole in the sky where the sun was shining through–that was pretty cool. Then it got really dark, the line was coming, and I moved a bit to get closer. Everything was turning orange, it was raining, and I got my car stuck in a muddy ditch. That was a terrible place to be: on a rural road, stuck in a ditch, the sky is funky, it’s raining, and oh yeah it’s a friggin’ tornado-warned storm bearing down on me.
Luckily for me there wasn’t a tornado or hail, just rain and some lightning, and after 5 minutes of trying to figure out a way out (there wasn’t one, and I didn’t have any boards to roll over) and being sick of the cows staring at me like an idiot, I was right about to sheepishly call 911 when the local sheriff pulled up. After breaking his tow cable we used mine and he finally got me out. I was fully soaked.
Now it was getting fairly dark and it’d be hard to see any tornadoes, though they were still out there (and another had just gone near Marietta to the south, near the Texas border). But it wasn’t raining, and the storms that had intensified as they rolled by got a lot more electric, and was spawning cloud lightning like crazy. So I found a nice spot and I think got some fairly decent pics.
That was pretty much it. I’m sure the real chasers (by the way, I didn’t see ANY chasers today, nor camera crews, unlike my first chase up in the Texas panhandle a few weeks ago) got some nice shots and probably did stupid things like drive into one, but oh well.
— Alan
