Bonus day perhaps...T-1

Arrived without much ado last night bar a 45 minute delay at Chicago and the insistence of US Customs to examine the bottle of scotch I'd bought duty free at Manchester (the one bagged and sealed with the receipt prominently displayed) in great detail. There's some sort of machine the bottle get's put in, how it works I've no idea. I did offer to let the young man in charge try some, but he wasn't a whiskey drinker.

Getting back on track. The graphic above is what the Storm Prediction Centre thinks today's tornado probability looks like. To remind you all a 5% risk means you have a 5% chance of being within 25 miles of a tornado within the shaded area. Doesn't sound great, but remember when you're chasing you can position yourself in the most favourable area and your chances become significantly higher. 5% is pretty good, and even a 2% day can work out very well indeed.

Today we have a couple of constraints: We're not expecting the rest of our party to arrive until mid-late afternoon - that's "all being well" as one of the ironies of storm chasing is that your flight may be delayed by...storms as happened to Glenn on Thursday. The second is that we're all booked into our current hotel in Oklahoma City tonight with the expectation of one last hearty dinner before we disappear into the famine zone, eking out an existence at truck stops; it won't be long before I'm desperately missing fruit and vegetables though you may find this hard to believe! I'd better caveat that statement: If there is good food to be found, then we will find it. This gives us a window of a few hours to the get the chase done, and the edge of the predicted area is at least an hour and a half's drive away. For the geographically challenged, The state of Oklahoma (looking like a pan) is to the south west of the predicted area and the city of Oklahoma, where we temporarily reside is very slightly west of centre in the state.

We'll have a Chinese Parliament this afternoon and decide what to do: to chase or not to chase, that is the question.

As I write this the tornado siren has just gone off outside the hotel...it's just a test but it still makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck!