UK Storm Chasing - Tornado Alley (24-5-02)

Day 11 (24-5-2002) Click on any of the the Photos to Enlarge
We leave the Days Inn Woodward Oklahoma heading down into south west Oklahoma, report suggest that there is a good chance of a tornado. We sit around waiting for something to develop. Cu starts to form, at this points it's a sit and wait time, you know they are coming, it's tempting to move to get closer to them, but if you do that you could end being in the middle and seeing nothing or maybe too much, or moving away in an attempt to get round them and being miles away if something does happen.
We move a little more away to the south as we are getting covered by cloud, we are now out of range of the weather radio so all we can now go on is what we can see, but the storm is wide and we get covered again by cloud. We can't see and we can't hear, this just isn't working, heading north again in a hope of hearing the weather radio, we can hear the radio again so we park up on the side if the road again and wait for it to pass and hope we are far enough away from it.
Just north of rocky we see a distant funnel cloud.
We are heading towards Cordell Oklahoma when Steve notices something to his left, we pull over to the right (just in front of a police man). All the cloud around it is being pulled into a big rotating doughnut above us. It takes a bit to work this out but after looking at the video afterwards, and hearing other reports we are sure that we saw a rain wrapped tornado.
We then take shelter again in a garage for court incase of any hail, there was massive downpour of rain, but no hail.
Knowing that we need to be down in Texas tomorrow we say goodbye to this storm and head off south. Notice the picture of mamma cloud to the right.
	We finally come across Tom's Burger King, 5 miles north of Lawton, Oklahoma with phone sockets. It gives us another chance to log on and catch up with what is happening.
While on route on the US-82 we hear a tornado warning go out, Steve looks out of the window and notices a tornado in the dark do a brief touchdown, by the time we had found somewhere to stop and park it had started to go back up.
We chase the storm on to small town in Texas called Albany, where we had the chance to use our SLR camera's. We continued on to our destination finishing up at a Super 8 in Abilene Texas at 5am in the morning and fell into bed.
Map of route