{"id":4201,"date":"2010-05-14T00:00:41","date_gmt":"2010-05-14T08:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/?p=4201"},"modified":"2010-08-11T22:29:57","modified_gmt":"2010-08-12T06:29:57","slug":"may-14-2010-permian-basin-tx-supercells","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/2010\/05\/14\/may-14-2010-permian-basin-tx-supercells\/","title":{"rendered":"May 14, 2010 Permian Basin TX supercells and lightning"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today we woke up pretty much where we needed to be — in Midland, TX.\u00a0 A boundary was oriented WSW-ENE a little north of I-20 from Monahans to Midland.\u00a0 With plenty of sun, instability and moisture, it appeared that tornadic supercells might develop near the front during the afternoon.\u00a0 Our group headed from Midland to Monahans for lunch, and shortly after noon there was already some deep moist convection in the vicinity.\u00a0 My stomach overruled my eyes, and I elected to head to a BBQ place in Monahans, even as an impressive storm tower was not too far northeast of town.\u00a0 The BBQ lunch went quickly, fortunately, but when we got back on the road it turned out that the updraft that we had stopped briefly to look at just prior to lunch had dropped a couple of tornadoes!\u00a0 That is just not right.<\/p>\n

Several storms trekked northeastward across the boundary during the afternoon, and we went back and forth across the boundary between Monahans, Penwell and Goldsmith several times.\u00a0\u00a0 The storms featured low bases and wall clouds near and north of the boundary, but little else of note.\u00a0 By 3 or 4 p.m. the boundary was moving south and undercutting the storms with rain-cooled air.\u00a0 The first image below is of the CB near Monahans just before lunch.\u00a0 The next three are of a supercell base south Penwell, prior to the cold air undercutting it.<\/p>\n

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\nOnce the boundary and the cold north winds began to sag south of I-20, the chance of a tornado near the boundary diminished considerably. We targeted a cell or two near Crane, and these were undercut. We continued south to another storm near McCamey, far enough from the dreaded boundary for some fun with lightning near sunset. These images are looking mostly west, between McCamey and Rankin on U.S. 67, I think!
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\nThe cloud-to-ground lightning was so frequent in the storm to our west that I was able to catch many bolts despite the relatively bright conditions around sunset time. For instance, image 1580 above was just 1\/6 second in exposure time.\u00a0 The F4 aperture setting wound up being a little too wide.\u00a0 I likely clicked the shutter just after seeing the first flash of lightning.\u00a0 Image 1598 was a two-second exposure at F11.\u00a0 The storm was quite close at this point and we got the heck out of there in short order after this bolt!<\/p>\n

I called for rooms in Ozona, and the occasionally severe storms followed us from Iraan to Ozona.\u00a0 We stopped near Ozona before checking into the motel for some more great lightning photography.<\/p>\n

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Today we woke up pretty much where we needed to be — in Midland, TX.\u00a0 A boundary was oriented WSW-ENE a little north of I-20… [Read More]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[42,16,15,11],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4201","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-42","7":"category-lightning","8":"category-sunsets-and-storms","9":"category-supercells","10":"entry","11":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4201"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4229,"href":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4201\/revisions\/4229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}