Date: April 13, 2012
Time: Late Afternoon
Place: Granite, Blair, Oklahoma City, OK
Camera: T3i
Warnings: TOR
Rating: S5

It's hard to adequately describe days where a dream literally come true. Today, after 15 years of waiting for the storms to come to me or catching glimpses of storms through dense tree cover, I finally embarked on my first legit central plains storm chase! Now that Toni and I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the plains are only 4 hours away making these weekend trips possible for the first time. Today we headed west on I-40 with hopes of being in western Oklahoma by early afternoon. There were initial doubts whether storms would be able to initiate, but hearing about a morning tornado in Norman, OK made me pretty hopeful.

It was around Shamrock, TX that we first noticed storms exploding south and east of us. These towers went up incredibly quickly. The first tough call of the day came in deciding how to leave the interstate. Having memorized Sprint's 3G coverage map, I knew that leaving I-40 also meant leaving radar data, unless we could get south to Altus, OK. After fretting for a while, we decided drop south of the interstate at Elk City, OK. Our hope was that we would be able to visually pick our way between storms until we got cell service again. Unfortunately, the storms had another idea. As we neared Granite, OK it became clear that these storms had turned really nasty, and that punching through blindly would be the only option if we were to get south. We pulled off the road at the edge of the rain curtains and listened to the thunder, hoping that a path south would clear up. I have to admit, just feeling the cool outflow winds (not having AC in the car) and listening to the rumbles was one of the nicest things ever.

After trying a couple unsuccessful phone calls (trying to get verbal radar updates), we tenatively crept a little further south into the rain -- ending up a few miles north of Blair. By this time, the precip was totally blinding and we had no clue how the storms had evolved, having been without radar for about 45 minutes. Thus the 2nd tough call of the day was turning around and leaving the storm behind. Let me tell you, when we got back into cell service and saw what a beast the second cell had become, we knew we made the right call.

We paralleled the storms on the interstate for a couple more hours. But by this time we were badly out of position and daylight was quickly slipping away. There were a couple instances were we considered blasting south again, but darkness and the nagging cell holes made us think otherwise. We followed the storms all the way to OKC, where I tried getting a few lightning shots (no luck, there just wasn't much lightning at all). After narrowly avoiding a speeding ticket entering OKC, we got a hotel northeast of town and called it a day. Interestingly, the storms weren't quite done with us. As midnight neared, the eastward-moving storms took a nearly 90 degree left turn and ended up hitting us directly (in a much weakened form, however). All in all, this was an amazing day. We were out of position pretty much all day, but that didn't matter. I finally stormchased. Now to get ready for tomorrow, which looks to be even bigger than today!!!