After having a major disappointment yesterday, I was in the mindset that I would just stay in my room today and study for finals. When I woke up though, I found that capes were in the 3000 J/kg range, speed shear was perfect on the soundings, and convection was already starting to our west. The SPC favored an outbreak of severe weather. Nicole and I went to eat at Crossroads and saw on the television that a tornado watch was in effect for our area, and a severe thunderstorm warning had been issued in Grady County, just to our west. By the time we made it to the dorms, another smaller storm formed just to our southwest, and the northern storm that prompted the warning was developing something of a hook. Nicole grabbed her weather radio and we jumped in the car and drove north to a gas station by north campus so we could see over the flat land. On the way, a tornado warning was issued for the two counties to our west and we could see a very impressive, textbook-style shelf cloud showing strong inflow. I hid my car under the gas station cover so it wouldn’t be damaged by hail (we got dime to nickel sized hail). There was a television in the gas station and we saw the two storms had merged, and they were doing live helicopter coverage on the storm approaching Norman.

Soon, another tornado warning was issued, warning residents on the south side of Norman. We were on the north side of Norman and saw a second shelf cloud south of us. Meanwhile, the television was showing images from Noble and southern Norman of a wall cloud lowering and rotating. Everyone was expecting the storm to drop a significant tornado any moment. After the hail stopped at our location, I started driving south. The roads were so flooded I actually lost my brakes and had to use the water friction with my hand brake to stop. We knew that it was not raining on Highway 9, so we were trying to get down there when we heard another tornado warning issued for Cleveland County. In this warning, they actually said it was a dangerous situation for people in Norman - wording that I have never seen included in any kind of warning. Tornado sirens went off, and someone on the radio declared that a wall cloud with strong rotation was descending on top of the Lloyd Noble Center. This would put me right in its path, so we parked at the Couch dormitory for shelter and watched more news coverage of the wall cloud passing over the Lloyd Noble Center. Soon, Nicole and I headed south again and stopped by the Lloyd Noble Center to take some impressive pictures of the wall cloud. We then chased the nearly stationary storm eastward for a while, photographing the wall cloud over Highway 9 and over some apartments nearby.

We chased it a bit farther and wound up in the hail shaft again, so I parked at a gas station (the Phillips 66 we stopped at on my very first chase) and waited for the quarter-sized hail to stop. Nicole and I then headed back to campus. Severe Thunderstorm Warnings continued to be issued for this storm as it slowly tracked to the southeast. We went to the fourteenth floor of Sarkey’s Energy Center and took some pictures, then went back to our dorms.

In our dorms, we found another thunderstorm trying to form to our northeast. We tried catching up to it and it died out, so we headed south to catch up to the storm that was still going strong that had hit Norman earlier. We found my first pileus clouds on our way. Pileus clouds occur when cumulonimbus clouds are pushed extremely high into the atmosphere, and the wind in the upper troposphere blows on it hard enough to form an icy cap. South of that, we saw two spots where the storms had actually hit the top of the troposphere and were spreading out along the tropopause. Then it turned dark, so we enjoyed some good lightning in Ada before heading back to OU.

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