May 6, 2001: Supercell Over Norman!

This day was originally supposed to be a "study for tomorrow's final exam" day. However, the presence of a large supercell looming out my dorm room window prompted me to call up some chase partners and hit the road. A number of supercells developed this day along I-35, and many of these storms produced tornadoes.Unfortunately, our storm did not produce a tornado. At times, it looked as though our storm could produce a tornado at any moment, and a few funnel clouds did almost make it to the ground. The mesocyclone passed right over the Loyd Noble Center just south of OU, and the storm dropped golfball hail on campus. Todays supercells were much more impressive in size than the Cordell supercell that occured on the previous day. Depsite not seeing a tornado, I was very happy with the chase. I took plenty of nice stills of the storm over south Norman, and it was a perfect end to my first spring in Oklahoma.

NOTE: I have not scanned all of my pictures from this chase. I hope to update soon!

This is the storm as it passed over Loyd Noble. It appears as though there is a tornado on the ground, but this is only because the trees in the distance make it appear so.

We moved on down the road to catch back up with the storm. This picture was taken looking NNE and shows a developing wall cloud and a nice RFD notch. The RFD is made evident by the eroding back end of the updraft near where the flanking line intersects the main body of the storm.