Today we woke up pretty much where we needed to be — in Midland, TX. A boundary was oriented WSW-ENE a little north of I-20 from Monahans to Midland. With plenty of sun, instability and moisture, it appeared that tornadic supercells might develop near the front during the afternoon. Our group headed from Midland to Monahans for lunch, and shortly after noon there was already some deep moist convection in the vicinity. 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. 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! That is just not right.
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. The storms featured low bases and wall clouds near and north of the boundary, but little else of note. By 3 or 4 p.m. the boundary was moving south and undercutting the storms with rain-cooled air. The first image below is of the CB near Monahans just before lunch. The next three are of a supercell base south Penwell, prior to the cold air undercutting it.
Once 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!
The 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. The F4 aperture setting wound up being a little too wide. I likely clicked the shutter just after seeing the first flash of lightning. Image 1598 was a two-second exposure at F11. The storm was quite close at this point and we got the heck out of there in short order after this bolt!
I called for rooms in Ozona, and the occasionally severe storms followed us from Iraan to Ozona. We stopped near Ozona before checking into the motel for some more great lightning photography.
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