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Howdy all!  It is May 1 as I write this, my first post since I left California for my chase season a couple of weeks ago.  I have a lot of catching up to do on Stormbruiser.  Tempest Tours’ 2012 Tour 1 began out of Arlington, TX, on April 21, and ended on April 30.   The first half was very slow storm-wise, and the last half was very active.  We saw a supercell near Springfield, CO, on April 26; a brief tornado near Council Grove, KS, on April 27; nice night lightning near Benjamin, TX, on April 28; a nasty supercell near Lubbock, TX, on April 29; and another fierce supercell in the eastern TX Panhandle on April 30.  Check back often for updates!

This page is for the Memphis-to-Wellington, TX supercell and likely tornado on April 30.  We are relatively certain that the strongly rotating whirl that evening was a tornado —- check out the pics and video (video link is above).   Below is my chase account written shortly after the chase for the chaser community.

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My apparent “no brainer” forecast for the western end of the high CAPE lobe near the dry line NW of LBB did not pan out very well. We sat near Littlefield watching towers go up and down — mostly down. A large CB was visible towards AMA, but was soft for the most part from about 4 to 5 p.m. A much better and beefier CB exploded to our SE, near Post. I briefly considered blasting SE 70 miles for this, but did not. With my forecast target area falling apart, I elected to head east towards a towering cumulus cloud that was near Kress. If it did not impress, then I figured that it wouldn’t be too difficult to latch on the AMA area storm(s), which continued to have issues.

The Kress updraft poofed out but a new strong storm tower quickly developed not too far north of it. We blasted through Silverton and towards Memphis in order to get good position on it. Meanwhile, a left-split from the Post-area complex was headed NNE and was on a collision course with our increasingly impressive Clarendon supercell. Area dew points were lower than I would have liked — in the upper 50s — but low-mid 60s were waiting in SW OK. We finally got in good position a bit NNE of Memphis, and viewed some fairly impressive structure including a large low-level inflow band and occasional wall cloud. Disaster struck, though, when we got stuck trying to turn around (3-to-7-or-more-point turn) on a soft and sandy side road. Fortunately, Brian Morganti was now with our group, and his 4WD helped to straighten us out and get us out of the mess. We would have been pummeled by 2 or 3 supercell cores had he not just joined us at Kress!

6507 below is of the left-split supercell that was heading NNE towards our nearby developing storm.

We were skirted by the core of the lead supercell west of Wellington and received a few dime and nickel hailstones. The left mover to the south weakened just as it neared, and the remains were ingested into our nearby supercell. We headed south on U.S. 83 out of Wellington to take a look at the front end. Structure was quite nice with a low-hanging action area to our NW, though contrast and light conditions were poor. While some 8 miles S of Wellington (near the county line, I think) a good-sized dust whirl was viewed to the NW. It persisted for at least a couple of minutes, with some rotation in the clouds above. It approached quickly and a wide swath of dusty outflow was soon descending upon us. We got out of there in a hurry! The dust whirl did not seem to be associated with the primary action area of the mesocyclone, but it was fairly strong and long-lived —– a very strong gustnado or weak tornado hybrid, I guess.

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***May 1 UPDATE!!***   Upon review of our images and video 24 hours after the event, we are going with “tornado” for this tight and strongly rotating item.  Wide video shows a nicely persistent and rotating cloud above the whirl.  The tornado event was from about 8:29 to 8:32 p.m. CDT, and was a mile or so west of U.S. 82 and about seven miles south of Wellington.  An RFD was kicking up dust to our SSW during the event, and though the tornado was not back in towards the old action area near the core, I think a new meso near the leading edge was developing and was responsible for the tornado.  The “tornadic” circulation appeared too strong, too large, and too persistent for “gustnado” status.

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With little light remaining we got out ahead of the cell a bit along 62 on the way to Altus and made a few stops to admire the view. Plenty of dust could be seen beneath the updraft base, but it was impossible to ascertain if any legitimate tornadoes were in progress.

I went to bed very happy — the Kings beat the Blues 5-2 in Round Two, Game Two in St. Louis to take a 2-0 lead in the series.

Link to NWS Amarillo page for April 30, with radar image of Wellington storm

This day began in Vernon, TX, and we targeted the warm front/boundary that was in the Lamesa area midday.  It lifted north a tad during the afternoon and convection began west and SW of Levelland late afternoon.  A supercell got its act going just north of Levelland.   A large gustnado developed to our south while we hugged a menacing wall cloud. The cell was a little outflowish with a large precip core, and RFD winds kicked up large dust plumes along Highway 114 east of Levelland.

An area of interest showed some promise just north of Smyer (along 114), but dust and poor contrast made it difficult to see exactly what was happening.  I elected to head east and north a little for some structure and maybe some back lighting, and this is when a new updraft went up quickly just south of 114, I think.  This one quickly strengthened, became the dominant cell, and developed a big hook and was tornado warned.  We zoomed southward around the west side of Lubbock on the loop, and had a good look at the supercell and frequent lightning to our southwest.  The storm turned to the ESE and headed towards the southern fringe of LBB.  We got east of the updraft in light rain and occasional small hail on the southwestern fringe of Lubbock, north of Slide.  We had a pretty good look into the notch area from some 5-8 miles away and saw no tornado, or good wall cloud for that matter.  Dust was a problem, it was getting dark, and lightning was not frequent enough to help out much.

Quarter-size hail chased us farther east and south along U.S. 87, and we let the thing pass to our north.  Again, it was difficult to discern much at low-levels due to dusty inflow.  We inched back north along 87 after the cell had passed by (or at least 80 percent of the core).  We stopped at the Lubbock/Lynn county line and picked up hailstones that measured up to 3 inches. Also, blowing hail fog made driving extremely hazardous —– it was the first time I had witnessed blowing hail fog!  We saw numerous vehicles off of the road with broken glass.  The bulk of the city of Lubbock dodged a bullet with this one.

We hung out near Newton, and then Marion, for much of the early-to-mid afternoon.  We waited and waited for something to get strong and that wasn’t going to immediately blast north into murk north of I-70.  It looked like another case of ill-timed upper-level support, as the early morning upwards motions were now replaced by subsiding air.  The storms that did go up on the boundary to our west and southwest were not impressive.  And, a perusal of the SPC mesoscale page showed that any storm that did go up would not have much time to improve in quality air.  Hmmmph.

Finally, around 5 p.m. we committed to a couple of developing storms coming towards Marion and Strong City from the El Dorado area.  One was a bit east of 177, and the other one a tad west of 177.  These had relatively decent rain-free bases and were fed by nice and strong easterly inflow.  Organization seemed strange, though, and I had problems figuring out just what the heck was happening.  South of Council Grove, we observed a funnel cloud with the west cell (some five miles distant).  It persisted for a couple of minutes and quit. We lost sight of this base as we maneuvered through Council Grove and continued north on 177.  When we emerged out of the trees and river-bottom areas a few miles north of town, the base to our east several miles looked promising.  But, lo and behold, nice low-level circulation was quickly developing VERY near to our east.  A funnel developed, came halfway down, and a tight ground rotation was observed in the trees beneath it for about 30 seconds.  It dissipated somewhat quickly.  Our location was about halfway between Alta Vista and Council Grove, and I put the tornado at 6:00 p.m., maybe a mile-and-a-half east of 177.

We tried to keep up thereafter and slowly fell behind.  We found ourselves at Burlingame in time to watch a different storm get tornado-warned and scream off towards Topeka. It showed an “area of interest” on its back end, and some dangly stuff was teasing the ground, but rotation was non-evident.

There was little to nothing worth pursuing 45 minutes prior to sunset, and we headed to Emporia for dinner.  We were a bit lucky to be so close to one of the few tornadoes that did occur in Kansas today.  Given the expectations, the chase was a bit underwhelming and disappointing.

A youtube clip of the Council Grove tornado is here.

The first two images below were taken south of Council Grove along 177.  The third one (6344) was about a minute after the tornado dissipated, looking east from 177.

Photographer Kelly Delay was with our group, and he managed an excellent shot of the tornado.  Kelly’s images from the tour can be found on his Clouds 365 page, his Facebook page, twitter, Kellydelay.com, etc.

While is the midst of a lame weather pattern like the current one, the tour tries to make up for a lack of storms with pretty scenery.  We left Raton, NM, and headed to Taos, NM, for lunch.  Our route to Taos was through spectacular Cimarron Canyon.  At one point in the canyon, where the sheer cliffs tower hundreds of feet above the Cimarron River, a sign says that you must have a permit to stop along the turnout and view the canyon area.  A ranger drove by, stopped in the middle of the road, and yelled “YOU GOTTA BUY A PERMIT”!  Right — we are gonna buy a permit to stop here for five minutes to admire the surroundings.  Silly.

Anyhow, we found a delicious Mexican Restaurant in Taos (Randy’s?), and the food was good there, too.  Enough monsoon-like moisture at mid-levels was in place for mountain storms in the area.  One of these was back to our east a little, so we headed back through the canyon, past the spot where we saw some deer on the way in, and observed a high-based junky thing that bordered on interesting and pretty.    This was around Springer and Wagon Mound, along I-25.

The weak convection dissipated towards sunset, and I was able to grab some nice sunset stills while we headed north back to Raton.

Later that evening, I took several of the guests some 15-20 miles east of Raton (via Yankee, NM) to view the nice, dark starry skies.  Despite an elevation of about 8000 feet, the weather was quite mild and the winds were calm—quite unbelievable for late April!

Today was the final chase day for the Tour 8/Doswell group.  The previous day featured the murk and messy nonsense in central and eastern NE, so I was ready to head out west for some pristine skies.  The outlook for severe weather along Colorado’s front range was rather slim, but the surface flow was upslope and moist enough for some high-based updrafts.  We made our way from Cozad to Limon and west to Interstate 25, between Castle Rock and Colorado Springs.  This is right along the Palmer Divide:  the elevated, favored area for storm formation on many late spring and early summer afternoons.  Given the “35-40 knots of deep layer westerly shear” here, according to SPC, I was hoping for a picturesque, isolated, rotating updraft.  Well, we got about four of them, one after the other!

Storm cells went up west of Larkspur (which is along I-25 north of Monument) and moved east.  We waited near the Interstate, and moved east a little with one or two of these.  The updrafts sputtered east of the Interstate due to a decrease in low-to-mid-level instability, and we headed back to the Interstate as the next pulse  strengthened over the mountains.

The first couple of cells were unimpressive, but the last two were somewhat strong (see images above).  I elected to place ourselves in the path of the core of the last supercell, and we caught a rainbow and some one-inch hail a little south of Larkspur.  I was going to continue east with this updraft, but then the sun came out and the light on the backside of the storm was quite nice.  We stopped on a hill on the west side of the Interstate a little north of Palmer Lake and set up the tripods.