We just received a high priority phone call at the StormChase.com forecasting center from the North Pole. It was Santa’s lead elf meteorologist, Dr. Bouncy Sugar Socks. Poor little guy was freaking out!! It seems that Santa is very worried about the Christmas Eve forecast for supercells and possible tornadoes over parts of Oklahoma and Texas, as well as the strong turbulence over the United States due to a strong upper jet.

My storm chasing tour guest come from all over the world and to a person who is visiting Tornado Alley for the purpose of chasing storms, they sometimes go home with the feeling that a person must be mad to live here. From their point-of-view, if the weather cooperates with the tour during their visitation – they’ll see extreme weather at its best, or sometimes at its worst. But, in reality most people that live throughout the Great Plains have never seen a tornado and most never will.

A slow moving system centered over Texas appears to not be in a hurry to go anywhere fast. The lingering system is bring rain and flooding to much of the southern states and even into the central plains. The Norman, OK WFO has issued Flood Watches for most of central Oklahoma as periods of heavy rain are dumping up to an inch per hour in some areas.

When four friends, including two NFL players decided to head out into the Gulf of Mexico for a fishing trip on the morning of Saturday February 28th, their fate was probably already sealed.