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Central Oklahoma - 06 May 2001
Another moderate risk, only for Eastern Oklahoma this time. Storm developed early over the axis of the dryline and stationary front, which happened to be in the McClain County area at the time. Two storms developed near Norman, one to the west and one to the south. I wasn't planning on chasing that day, for I had finals to study for. I knew they were out there, but I figured they weren't going to do anything. I went to lunch and as I was walking back to my room I saw Chris, and he asked me if I had seen the radar lately. While I was gone the storms had gone severe. We went up to the 12th floor of my dorm (Couch Center) and could clearly see the two wall clouds in the two different storms. We believe we saw a possible tornado about 3-4 miles west of our dorm, but it was hard to tell. (The NWS is still reviewing video tapes and radar.)
We continued to watch stuff as the sirens sounded for the first tornado warning about 3:15. We could see activity south of Highway 9 and by Highway 77, and we decided to leave and chase it. We saw the wall cloud and saw lowerings, and there was a reported tornado, but we could only see the top part of it. This prompted another warning which explicity said "THIS IS DANGEROUS SITUATION FOR PEOPLE IN NORMAN!" Turns out the wall cloud passed pretty close to my boss's house. Rest assured, we saw a tornado in Norman, we just don't know which one!! We stopped several times and then decided to head south to Noble on Highway 77. Little did we know, we drove under the wall cloud that we thought had produced a tornado earlier as we were keeping an eye on the one we were chasing. (Lesson learned: Always look straight up first!) Luckily it was dying out as it was approaching the other wall cloud, so there was no threat. We headed East on Cemetary Road and stopped many times taking pictures and waiting for something to drop. Nothing did.
At that point we decided to head for a storm south of us, and we continued east and then hit 177 south, where we encountered another storm forming. This had promising signs of dropping something, but was swallowed up by the first storm we were originally chasing as it moved south.
We saw several wall clouds as the storm tried to drop something as we chased along County Line Road (between McClain and Garvin). We gave up just as we hit a horrible section of the road which gave us a top speed of 10 mph. We then hit Highway 1 north at Roff and stopped in Ada at Carl's Jr. On the way home we had a nice lightning show from storms north of Oklahoma City, and we made it back just in time for a 'mandatory' hall meeting!
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