While most teenagers would spend their spare time watching Netflix and hanging out with friends, I can be found spending my free time looking at maps of North America with twisting lines and colors and then tell you it’s going to be 77 degrees tomorrow.

Where is the root of my burning passion for the weather starting? I’ve always had a fascination for weather, but a cloudy April day in Oklahoma City is the beginning of this story. Ironically, on Friday, April 13, 2012, my mom, brother and I went to Norman to watch the University of Oklahoma spring football game. Traffic was heavy west of Oklahoma City, so we took a back road to get to Bricktown, which is an area made up of once abandoned brick warehouses that have been converted into restaurants, shops and hotels. We ate a fairly decent lunch at a restaurant inside the baseball park. The first eerie sign that this was going to be an interesting afternoon was the relative lack of people. We were the only ones in the restaurant, and it felt like we were the only ones in all of Bricktown.

At the restaurant, which was a sports bar type place, the TVs began showing weather reports on some brewing storms off to the southwest of Norman. They had severe thunderstorm warnings on them, indicating that some large, damaging hail and high winds were possible, however neither Norman nor Oklahoma City were under a warning yet. They also reported that traffic on Interstate 35 was heavy, and that is the main highway that runs north to south through Oklahoma City, Moore, and Norman. We waited for traffic to ease up a little bit, but since it was 3:30 on a Friday afternoon, we knew it wouldn’t settle down a lot, so we took off to Norman anyway. As we got closer, the severe thunderstorm warning was extended to include Norman. The sky darkened to the point all the street lights were starting to turn on. Then as we entered Moore, the radio was interrupted with “The National Weather Service in Norman has issued a tornado warning for central Cleveland and southern Oklahoma counties until 4:45 p.m.” The warning was issued at 3:59 p.m., and at 4:02 p.m. a tornado was on the ground in Norman.

While I never actually saw the funnel, the feel of driving towards the storm was exhilarating to an extent that words could not describe. We stopped at a very shady gas station along the interstate to wait out the heavy rain and also to not get our then two-year-old bright green Camaro into the hail core of the storm, where you would be pummeled with softball size hail. We finally arrived at our hotel, which was just about three-quarters of a mile from where the tornado passed. The hotel had no power, so we could get into the room only guided by the dim emergency lights in the hallway. After we put our bags in the room and determined there was nothing to do in a hotel room that has no power, we did what anyone that lives in tornado alley would do–drive around and look at damage. The storm was rated an EF-2 tornado, with winds around 120 mph and capable of blowing away cars, roofs and uproot trees. We did not see too much damage other than roof damage, car damage, downed power lines and heavy damage to trees. When we got back to the hotel around 6:30 that night, power had been restored and even more storms were going up southwest of Norman, however they did not cause too much concern. In the end, only six people were sent to the hospital with minor injuries, despite only having three minutes of warning before the tornado entered the city.

I have had several close experiences with tornadic supercells, and each one was fascinating in its own way. No two storms are ever the same, which is really the main reason I love them so much. All weather is amazing and ever-changing, and for me, trying to predict the future and being only a degree or two off with no actual education in forecasting, is pretty neat.