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Central Oklahoma - 07 September 2001
I knew there would be a small fall chase season, but I didn't expect our first chase of the school year to be this early! Overnight the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) issued a moderate risk for parts of Oklahoma and Kansas with a 5% chance of tornadoes. This was later upped to 15%, as the biggest threats were severe hail and wind. The storms were expected to initialize in late afternoon and quickly form a line. However, there was a chance that supercells would form in front of the line, and that's where the threat of tornadoes would be.
We left at 1:30 with Amy and I following Dusty in my car, Da Egg. Chris and Thomas couldn't come because they had marching band practice, and Aaron rode with Dusty, so we had to take a second car and I was eager to take Da Egg out. We headed toward Anadarko where Kyle thought the best chance for supercells would be. Along the way, I was in almost constant contact with Chris, who was feeding me information of where the current line was. We saw anvils to our north, and Chris informed us those were part of the line. We parked ourselves just off Highway 9 west of Anadarko where we had a commanding view of the sky ahead of the line. If anything was to go up, we would see it.
Here I decided to replace my windshield wipers, for I had bought the new ones and never installed them, and after driving through a nasty storm in Nashville on the way out here, I knew I didn't want to drive through pouring rain with the old ones. Aaron proceeds to pull the wiper off the windshield, and it broke. The wiper fell off. We then spent a good 30 minutes trying to put on the new ones and the question arose: "How many meteorologists does it take to replace windshield wipers?" The answer was 4, with the guys fiddling around with the parts and Amy actually installing both of them. She had to put the old wiper on the driver side because we broke the new one in our fiddling. Enough of the side story...
At 4:30 we left our spot to where we saw towers going up. We observed as they broke the cap, and then pulled over to continue watching them. Two went up and were sheared away, and another emerged. This one seemed promising, for it began wrapping up, but it too kind of faded away. We decided to double back to Anadarko for some much needed thirst quenching and then north towards the line. As we were driving we could look back and see the clouds we had left explode. Figures. We then took Highway 152 east and then 92 south toward Chickasha. We drove through some pretty heavy rain as we corepunched through the line, and along 92 we ran into some golfball sized hail. Kyle radioed back, while laughing hysterically, that Dusty had rolled down his window to take a picture (while driving, of course) and a good sized hail stone was sucked in and smacked him on the head. Lesson learned: hail hurts. After we drove out of the core of the rain and hail, we pulled over to look at the hailstones, all while some scattered hail was still falling. We dodged these and took pictures (to come soon).
We took Highway 76 south to Lindsay where we stopped to watch the line again as the sun set, but nothing happend. We turned east to drive back to Norman where we encountered hurricane-like conditions. The wind was blowing 40-50 mph or more while it was pouring rain. Visibility was very low, and there was almost constant lightning. I would guess maybe 70 strokes a minute. It provided a strobe-light effect while we drove. One strike scared the beejezus out of us when a tree was hit about 50 yards from the road. Won't ever forget that one! We were in the rain and wind for most of the way home, and got back to the dorms around 9:00, where we promptly ordered pizza. No tornadoes, but definite intensity and fun!
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