Adrian supercell video

Our tour group had an amazing chase this Monday.  We began in Lubbock, washed the vans and had lunch in town midday, and headed northwest to Clovis, NM.  This put us in the middle of the south end of SPC’s slight risk area.  Flow at 500 mb today was marginal, NW at about 25-30 knots, and looked to be slightly anticyclonic.  Surface flow was S to SSE and fairly moist for northeast NM and the western TX Panhandle, with dew points roughly from 54F to 59F in the region.   CAPE numbers were near 2000 J/kg from about Tucumcari to Vega, TX.  Given the strong turning of the wind with height and the adequate instability, a decent supercell was quite possible.  I wasn’t sure exactly which area to focus on, though.  Some boundaries from morning storms were in the western part of the TX Panhandle, so the area along 385 from Hereford to Dalhart was considered.  We continued north from Clovis to San Jon, on I-40, and looked at radar, satellite, surface obs, the SPC meso-analysis pages, etc.  Given that strong cells were going up to our northwest (along I-25) and the best air looked to be in and around Tucumcari, I elected to head west and northwest.  A cell with a cloud top near 50,000 feet beckoned.  It was a little east of Las Vegas, NM, nearly 100 miles distant.  If it would move southeast in the northwest flow, then good supercellular stuff would ensue…I figured.

We went west on I-40 and north on 129 towards Conchas State Park.  Our Las Vegas storm still looked good on radar, but a new storm had quickly gone up between us and it.  Okay —- now we didn’t have to drive as far!  We set up on a hill along Hwy 104, a few miles west of 129.  Our new cell, west of Trementina, looked to have decent structure, but it was a bit distant and contrast was so-so.  Lightning was active in a cell to our south, and a new strong updraft was going up almost overhead.  We would have to leave soon in order to stay east of the new nearby activity, but low-levels were looking more interesting with the Trementina storm.  In fact, a good-sized lowering, or wall cloud had a funnel cloud sticking out of it that was about 3/4 of the way to the ground!  It didn’t persist, unfortunately, and we bailed east and south quickly thereafter.  Our Tempest Tours guide and driver, Chris Gullikson, has reviewed his video of the storm and it shows that the funnel cloud was in fact a tornado briefly.

We headed back towards Tucumcari and monitored the new convection that was just north of I-40.  It was not organized well at all, and it disappointed the heck out of me.  Why couldn’t this stuff get its act together?  There wasn’t anything to the south or southeast to interfere with it!  I called Brian Morganti, who was looking at some new storms in Oldham County, TX, west of Amarillo.  He wasn’t too upbeat about the look of the storm cells yet, but there was one that he couldn’t see too well that was looming behind the weak one that he could see.  This new cell was in western Oldham County, not too far from the NM/TX border, and it quickly had a good look on radar.  I decided to head east for it —- there was little reason to stick with the junk nearby.

The back end of the new supercell came into view for us somewhere west of San Jon.  The mid and upper part of the storm tower looked good, but not exactly atomic.  The storm was dropping slowly S to SSE, so I knew it was spinning nicely.  We just had to beat it to Adrian, where there was a paved road south.  On the approach to Adrian the sculpted low levels of the supercell came into view.  We had enough time to stop and gape for a few minutes at Adrian.  An active wall cloud teased us with a little funnel cloud or two.  It had that “look” that it really wanted to produce.  The storm’s updraft base was to our NNW now, and the precip core was not too far away to our north.  We stopped a mile south of Adrian, and then two miles south along FM 214.  The updraft base was in full “Mothership” mode by this time, and I needed all of my 16mm wide-angle lens to fit the thing in.  A wicked precip core developed, and intriguing shapes were barely visible inside or behind the core.  We thought that there might be a tornado inside there, but it was impossible to tell for certain.  Soon the storm became tornado warned, with confirmed tornado sightings!  I guess we did see a tornado—-we just weren’t certain at the time—-and a review of our stills and video suggest that one indeed was back in there behind the heavy rain curtain.  Chaser Jason Persoff reported that a large cone tornado was on the north side of the meso and it quickly became rain-wrapped.  This explains why we had little luck seeing it, as we were on the south side.

The structure and lightning with the storm were extremely impressive, tornado or no tornado.  We stopped a couple of more times farther south along FM 214.  Soon, the NM storms came rushing towards us and the supercell.  We were chased east towards Canyon, and the tornadic supercell was ingested and weakened considerably by the outflowing NM stuff.

Here are a handful of images of the Adrian Mothership Supercell —- more pics to come later.

By the way, I managed some great annular eclipse images from Jayton, TX, on May 20, and some very cool images of supercells in W OK on May 19.  We were close to the KS tornadoes on the 19th —- but had settled on heading down to OK instead.  We watched the storm towers that went up over Kingman from Pratt!  I hope to get the images posted soon.

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.

The previous day was active up north near Topeka, KS, and we stayed the night near Wichita.  The target area today was the Red River area, near Lawton and Wichita Falls.  The cap was strong and the chances for daytime storms along a SW-NE boundary from about Vernon to Oklahoma City were so-so.  Computer models indicated a big cell before sunset way down south, around Clairemont, TX.  But, dew points in that region were in the upper 40s, compared to the mid 60s near the Red River.  Models were certain about convection and even supercells somewhere near the boundary in SW OK…but were waffling as to whether storms would initiate before dark or not.

We drifted south to Wichita Falls and even a little south of there, even though a surface circulation and moisture convergence bullseye suggested that convection was more likely up towards Lawton.  I thought about blasting southwest to the Clairemont area (Kent County, TX) around 4 p.m., but resisted and decided to give our original target area a chance.  By 6 or 7 p.m., our area had little more than a struggling cumulus field, and that big and bad storm did indeed form in the middle of the wasteland between Abilene and Lubbock —- near Clairemont.  Shucks.

We rolled into Vernon at 8 p.m. and got a quick bite at McDonalds.  I reserved rooms in town, and then decided to blast SSW to the beast, now tornado warned!  It was 100 miles away, but I thought that we should be able to at least get a decent light show if we drove for an hour or so.  As we neared Benjamin, we were treated to some distant CGs out of the big storm’s anvil, and some nearby CGs due to new small cells.  After clearing these small cells and the rain south of Benjamin, we stopped and set up the tripods and had a little luck with some lightning crawlers.

The sunset pics were just south of Vernon.

I got rooms in Pierre, and on the way south a cluster of very strong storms matured west and north of PIR. We managed to squeeze ourselves in between several of these very electrified storms, and we had an amazing 4th of July thunder and lightning show! Lightning in these nearly stationary storms was practically continuous. At, Pierre, around midnight, Sioux Avenue had about a foot of water on it, and we had to find an alternate path to get to the Super 8!

The images above show the towering cumulus clouds southwest of Mobridge during the late afternoon.  (This was near Trail City and Promise.  Promise is a barely-there place along BIA 7 between Trail City and La Plant.  I think it is named after the yummy buttery spread.)  It was quite miserable in the sun, with a temperature near 90F and dew point of 77F!  We drove back and forth on the road for a time to try to stay in the shade of the clouds.  We were right on the front, too, and had little or no breeze.  What do you make of this line-up of hitchhikers?

We were somewhat despondent when nothing matured in our cu field near Promise, and we took the dirt road BIA 7 south to La Plant (in case a strong storm went up farther west on 212).  I took the first two images of the four above at 6:56 p.m. MDT (0056Z), from La Plant.  The cell was — you guessed it — practically right over Promise, SD.  A little more than 40 minutes later we were just southeast of the storm, along BIA 7.  Though we heard a pronounced hail roar, I think that the storm was already weakening at this point.  In the first image of the supercell (3741), a second strong updraft can be seen on the extreme right.  It is along the front and about 50 miles ENE of our nearby storm.

The lightning pics from Route 1804 about 15 NNW of Pierre are below.  I got a little artsy with the colorful sunset shot by jacking up the foreground brightness (the same image without the drastic photoshopping is also provided) —- it looks unnatural, of course, but I thought it was worth sharing.

We are leaving VTN currently. VTN and vicinity may well be where we want to be towards sunset, but for now we are being pulled west and perhaps north a little, towards an apparent mesolow near the Black Hills. The RUC shows a nice tongue of high CAPE along the SD/NE border to our west. Shear and instability look very good later this afternoon between VTN and the southwestern edge of the Badlands area. The latest satellite pic shows a cu field near CDR.

With plenty of time to kill, we roamed off of the beaten path (U.S. 20) and checked out the little hamlet of Eli, Nebraska.  There isn’t much there except for a few houses and a church.  I photographed Chuck driving his tractor back home from midday mass.

From Eli we drifted towards the northwest and into the Badlands of SD.  A handful of cloud towers tried to go up around Batesland and Wounded Knee, but the cap held strong, to our chagrin.  We killed some more time on the southern fringe of the Badlands, near a dinky place called Rocksprings.  Some activity to the west, near the Black Hills, looked good briefly but then shriveled.  I led some of the tour guests to a hilltop, where a circle of rocks marked an alien spaceship landing site.  Storm clouds percolated in the distance to the southeast, near Valentine.  Super.

Well, it was getting a little too late to go on a wild goose chase back to VTN.  We waited near Sharps Corner for some new activity that was approaching from northwest Nebraska.  These cells threw a big anvil and some mammatus overhead, but the general trend was weakening and blah-blah-blah.  I managed to get a lightning image and a few other so-so pics, including the “kiss of death” cloud.  Our beds for the night awaited in Kadoka.