Tornado Warnings Greet Pacers On Their Way To Oklahoma City

Try to imagine this for a moment. You're not from Oklahoma, but you're heading here for business. It's a work trip, so you're not really focused on anything aside from the job, and the moment you hit the Sooner State border, you're greeted by a line of severe thunderstorms and widespread tornado warnings.

This isn't a work of fiction, this is how Oklahoma welcomed the Indiana Pacers yesterday.

Without a doubt, yesterday's storm activity had to be in the top-five Oklahoma weather days for the year. 22 tornado warnings, torrential downpours, widespread flooding, fast-moving storms, North to South, border to border.

If you're not up on your Oklahoma sports at the moment, the OKC Thunder have earned their way back to their second NBA Finals against the Indiana Pacers. While en route yesterday to our capital city to start the championship round tomorrow, the Pacers' plane had to divert to Tulsa ahead of the storms, then take a beeline to Dallas before finding a break in the weather to complete their flight to OKC.

Now, Indiana isn't a stranger to tornadoes. They've had a pretty wild spring in the Midwest so far this year and have a similar number of large, violent F4/F5/EF4/EF5 twisters on record, but could you imagine heading straight into a storm like we had yesterday? In an airplane?

You might think that since tornadoes generally tear everything up on the ground, the really impressive weather is high in the atmosphere. As a twister rolls across the ground, the unstable air masses mix and shoot up through the storm. It makes for an almost unthinkable amount of severe turbulence and swirling air.

Championship play begins tomorrow. Time to Thunder Up!