May 5, 2001 Chase Summary
A great chase with our first tornado of the year just east of Cordell, OK at sunset.
Watch it 25X speed with this "Real" video loop of the supercell being born (1.6MB): CLICK HERE
A much better version of the video in Windows Media format (about 6MB) CLICK HERE
We started early afternoon heading out west to Vernon, TX. Later, after the convergence appeared to be slightly better in OK, we moved into southwest OK and eventually moved out west of Duke. We became increasingly pessimistic about the location and drifted back east and then north when the storm went up north of Hollis. We moved to a position on Hwy 6 south of Granite. From there we watched the rather unenthusiastic storm for quite a while, while it gradually grew.
After watching it really take off, we started following it past Granite and then up toward Setinel, OK.
More pictures of the storm as we moved with the storm to Cordell.
The last picture above is almost straight above our heads watching an anticyclonic rotation while while the wallcloud and cyclonic rotation was just off to our north.
We drove through Cordell and when we emerged on the east side of town, we could again see the wall cloud to the north.
Soon after this, the short lived purple tornado appeared.
Chase total 391.6 miles...one purple tornado :)