Today was a weekday but we had enough time that we could afford a storm chase. The SPC kept the risk categorized as “slight” but the wind and hail probabilistic graphics looked promising. After our physics lab test, Nicole, Catherine, and I headed out, going west as usual.

We drove directly west and heard that a Severe had been issued for parts of Western Oklahoma. This had actually been issued before we left campus, but the SPC was late in putting the graphic on their site. We saw some strange looking streaks in the cloud cover, and we stopped in Elk City so that Nicole and Catherine could photograph the sky while I filled up the car with gas. I set the gas pump to stay on until it was full and went over with Nicole to see the clouds. Catherine went inside where the gas attendant told her that sometimes the pump I was using doesn’t click off automatically. Fortunately, it did.

During this time, the streaks turned into a sky full of mammatus clouds! Mammatus clouds are something I have always wanted to see, and though I got to see a few bulges several weeks ago, I had never experienced an entire sky of well-defined mammatus before. Off in the distance, we could see towering cumulus that appeared to have broken the cap. With my car compass not working properly (I later found out why - operator error), we had lost our sense of direction, but we saw a definite cumulonimbus cloud, so we drove towards it. This was an experience. The roads got skinnier and skinnier until finally road signs disappeared. Looking at my mapping software after I got back, I could take a decent guess of how I finally got to the highway, but it was weird. At times, I had to search for a paved road.

After lots of beautiful lightning strikes, both cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground, the sky was getting dark. We decided to head back for campus and stopped twice on the way back: once to photograph a gorgeous sunset and again to make sure the bird I slammed into at 75mph didn't crack my windshield.

All content on this page, unless otherwise indicated, is © Nathan Bain, 2000 - 2008. The views on this page do not represent those of the Oklahoma Climatological Survey, the School of Meteorology, or the University of Oklahoma.