Especially weather severe enough to produce tornadoes. Now if you tell someone you're a stormchaser, they nod knowingly and ask you if you've ever seen a flying cow. They play pool and drink beer. Norman is a city of 80,000 located at the scruffy seam between open scrubland to the south and the commercial sprawl of Oklahoma City to the north. It's best known as home of the University of Oklahoma.
Rain is the most interesting thing that happens in Norman.
But the local weather is plenty interesting. Especially in May. Tornadoes reach a crescendo this month nationwide, when an average of 143 are reported. Many of these tornadoes sweep through Tornado Alley, a swath of the Plains that runs roughly from north-central Texas through Oklahoma and Kansas up into Nebraska and Iowa. By most accounts, this year's tornado season has been unusually quiet in the Plains, the range of the hard-core stormchaser. A couple storms spawned isolated tornadoes, but mostly it's been more bark than bite.