May 5, 2001: Cordell Oklahoma

My chase partners and I were very eager to get out and go chasing this day. This would be our last weekend in Oklahoma for the school year, and we had yet to see a tornado. The beginning of 2001 chase season started off slow, and our inexperience at the time was not helping matters much. This was our first spring in the plains, and school work had kept us from chasing in places that were too far to drive to like central Kansas. With our first year coming to a close, we desperatlety wanted to see a tornado. Our target for this day was Altus in SW Oklahoma. We left Norman mid morning and headed down the I-44 turnpike toward Lawton. We pulled into Frederick sometime around lunch at a gas station in the midst of a huge chaser convergence. Bluestein was there, as well as the DOWs and a number of TV crews. At the time, there was some scattered cu along the dryline, but not much was going on. Finally, as we sat in Buger King eating our lunch, one of the cu along the dryline began to shows signs of big vertical development, so we headed out after it. However, the updraft kept collapsing and pulsing. After about an hour or so of this, the lone cumulus "tower" developed a small shower. At the same time, the cu began to show signs of rotation, and soon developed very long inflow bands. Eventually, the "storm" grew to a meager 30,000 ft. It was a very small, low-topped supercell. Despite it's small size though, this storm was very photogenic, and at times the updraft would really start corkscrewing. We ran into another chaser convergence down the road, led by our friend Eric Nguyen. While they stopped for gas, we headed off toward the storm. It then produced a funnel cloud, which reached about half way to the ground. We stopped for some stills, and then took off after it again. It began to like a bit disorganized, so when bad reports of a better looking storm to the south came out, MANY chasers left our storm, and headed for the southern one. We decided to stick with our storm, which turned out to be the best choice. Shortly after everyone left the storm, it produced a small tornado, which lasted for all but a few minutes. We heard the warning go out over the NOAA weather radio as we reached Cordell, and as we left the northern city limits, we were treated to an awesome pink tornado. Out 1st tornado!! We could now go home for summer vacation satisfied that we had finally seen our 1st tornado. This chase was a success on many levels. Enjoy the stills.

NOTE: I have not scanned all my images from this chase yet. I will update this page soon!

 

Low Topped supercell. Notice the inflow on the right side of the picture. Click to enlarge.

 

The tornado as it touched down outside of Cordell.

 

Same image from Bob's video camera.