With tornado activity well to our north yesterday, we decided to take a day off from chasing and explore Oklahoma! After sleeping in past noon, we decided to head east from Clinton, OK towards Oklahoma City and get some good southern barbecue. We stopped at Swadley’s Bar-B-Q on the western outskirts of Oklahoma City and had some pretty darn delicious ribs. It’s good I don’t live here… if I did, my belly would grow faster than a supercell on a sunny spring day with lots of CAPE.
After a very filling breakfast/lunch/dinner at Swadley’s, we took an hour drive northeast to the Oklahoma University campus in Norman, Oklahoma. As luck would have it, we parked right next to the “National Weather Center,” which is a building holding pretty much everything an atmospheric scientist like myself could ever dream of. In this single building, you can find the NSSL (National Severe Storms Laboratory), the SPC (Storm Prediction Center), the local Norman NWS office, the NEXRAD Radar Operations Center, CIMMS (the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorology Studies), and much, MUCH more. Take a look at all the organizations housed in this building here… it honestly blew my mind how many well-known and high-level institutions were in this one building.
There were two other separate weather buildings we saw: “Weathernews,” a company that provides forecasts and weather services for clients in shipping, aviation, transportation, and many other industries, and the “Radar Innovations Laboratory,” a building that is dedicated to advancing OU’s radar program.
Image credit: University of Oklahoma
With all our extra time, I also wrote a tutorial on reading Skew-T charts. Learning how to read Skew-Ts is a very important skill for any weather aficionado and will open up a new world of atmospheric knowledge to you. I did this because today (Thursday) is looking very, very tornadoey, and I will likely be posting Skew T images and talking about Skew-T things on tomorrow’s blog. If you would like to read this tutorial, you can find it here.
Speaking of today, the Storm Prediction Center is going for a “major severe weather outbreak for today and/or tonight” with ‘strong, long-track tornadoes likely from central and southern Kansas into western Oklahoma.’ We are currently in Clinton, OK, which is 85 miles west of Oklahoma City and in the “moderate” threat area in the map below.
In preparation for today’s action, we’ve utilized the shape-shifting qualities of Silly Putty and Play-Doh to make apparatuses that will help us stabilize our cameras. If we get ahead of the tornado’s path, we plan to leave “The Intecpt” (The Interceptor) in front of the ‘nader to catch it in all of its glory. Wish us luck!
