Just some brief notes. I've been out kicking around the plains chasing whatever storms will and lately hanging around the Norman area. Yesterday, I think I did pretty well on the forecast and headed over to the intersection of the low with the wrapping dryline & e/w boundary intersection as convergence was maximized there an cu was massing, etc. Cruised straight over to Chickasha and sat for awhile. I was having difficulty determining where the development was because all the low level thick cu was blocking my view and the satellite images I was looking at didn't show counties. Normally Swift would have helped but I recently upgraded it and broke the gps in it somehow. Anyway I finally figured out a storm was going up to my north about 15miles up toward Union City. I raced up there but got behind the developing TVS as it headed into OKC. I came in on hwy 66 to I44 and was right on the back of the occluded wallcloud and hail core which was just dumping huge amounts of precip, and hail. Hail drifts were supposedly up to 1 foot in some places, and up to 3" in size in places. Many people were stranded (even SUV's) and had to be towed, and many vehicle windows were punched out. [Keep this in mind when chasing around hail monsters]. At the time I thought it was likely that this storm was going to produce a tornado at any time and I considered trying to punch, but of course that would be folly to punch a large rain wrapped wallcloud with an extended rotating funnel where a significant torn could drop at any minute. Plus the traffic sucked! It was rush hour and just plain gridlock. What a pain. I finally diverted north up I44 then east - caught the back of the storm and saw a beautiful rainbow. Later another cell developed just south of OKC and moved east toward me so I played with it, but it was mainly a hail monster since it was behind the other storms. It did eventually become a meso though and had up to 4" hail indicated. For all this it was a bit disappointing because even though I nailed the area I was still behind because I couldn't see it develop early enough. I should have just stayed in Norman which is something I had considered.

On the chase yesterday while stopped a number of local OU chasers came up and chatted. Man these people are excited about storms here and friendly too! There was one girl named Kit that was just ecstatic because she had been in town and seen the funnel when it came through. She was also jumping around excited because the storm had busted her windows out- LOL!! One guy came up, and he had a harem of about 5 chase babes with him. They were all into storms which was cool.
 

Chase April 21st 2004 Oklahoma City, OK

Tornado Extreme Storm Chase