2002

Saturday May 29th

I'm ready for some storm action....BRING EM' ON!!!!

Carrie and I leave Houston Head to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. I had printed out a severe weather statement for that morning. We had Blink 182 going in the car and played around by reading the words off of the weather statement as the words to the song:)

Then as we entered Oklahoma we broke out singing 'Oklahoma', which amazingly enough Carrie knew more words to the song than I did;)

Since we were so close to Oklahoma's Capital building we drove by it. We drove down the road a piece and find a library not far from the Oklahoma Capital building. I then hop on the internet to check to see where we need to go and I email a few people while I'm at it;) We decide to go up to Guthrie just north of Oklahoma City and get a hotel room.

Warnings start in East Oklahoma and we, having been on the road since 5:45am, decide to get a 30 minute power-nap in. We get up and decide to catch a cell that is going to intersect an area just East of us.

Cell phone was a lifesaver on this trip

We see some cool cloud structure and then I receive a call from Joe Lawton who gives us a run-down of the situation. He directs us to a location and we follow his recommendations...good thing to as we saw some awesome cloud structure and lightning. We got into mostly pea-sized hail, with some quarter-sized pieces mixed in. Unfortunately, we found ourselves in a dead zone for my cell phone. I couldn't get messages and couldn't call out.

The lightning became very intense. I have seen it behave that way on occasion and always had some kind of rotation associated with it. I tried to call Joe...no reception....tried again still nothing. Finally my cell phone made connection and I reached him. He told me that he had tried getting hold of me. Apparently a tornado was not far away at all and about to cross the road...wrapped in rain and hidden in the darkness. He told me to stop right where we were...and I did thank goodness. It became worse and started hailing...we went to a hospital and pulled under something to weather the storm.

He told us to wait and when he saw that the coast was clear told us we could move on. We saw some great lightning heading back towards Guthrie and chased a bit more just for some distant shots of lightning.

This is the Radar Activity at the time we were chasing. Joe was kind enough to prepare this image. We were at the edge of the storm to the Northeast. *Special Thanks Joe Lawton for his radar updates and help during this storm chase. Visit his website.