June 3, 2022 Baca and Cimarron Storms

Start: Roswell, NM

Lunch: Tucumcari fast food

End: Liberal, KS (528 miles)

Storm Reports

SPC Day One/20Z

Chase account by Tempest guest Lesleyanne

A somewhat moist upslope flow regime was in place today in eastern CO and eastern NM. Moisture was a little too meager to permit much of a tornado threat (SPC blessed eastern NM with a 2% tornado risk), but shear was not in short supply at all. It looked like a decent High Plains supercell day. But where would the best storms be? It wasn’t particularly obvious. SPC’s slight risk extended from Kimball to Fort Stockton. Their hatched-hail area in northeastern NM and the extreme western Texas Panhandle seemed reasonable. I led the group north-northeastward from Roswell to Tucumcari, Dalhart and Boise City. By this time, a strong storm was beckoning near Kim and western Baca County, so we continued up to Campo and then west a bit. We watched a pretty supercell take shape to our west and northwest. It became HP-ish, and forced us south and east a little.

This nice supercell started to get a bit disorganized as it neared 287. Another chaser nearby needed help with a flat tire, so we helped get that taken care of as a hail core skirted us.

We headed back to Campo, and our only play continued to be this somewhat outflow-ish and semi-organized blob in southern Baca County. We scooted south a little and soon had a fabulous look at the back end of the cell, now in eastern Baca County.

That was rather fabulous! I elected to try to get right in front of the southward moving shelfy-thing. This was not too difficult, and we stopped again several miles south of the CO/OK border, just east of 287 (in Cimarron County). The nicely-sculpted southern edge of this activity extended from our NW to N to NE.

This sculpted feature wimped out some, but (mostly) in-cloud lightning started to increase some in the cell to our north. Then the sunset light came, and the landscape lit up, and the colors!! The cell was not outflowing as much now and a spin-up (weak tornado) was observed a few miles to our north. Nice! At our location we noticed a couple of “puffs” of warm air trade off with not-so-warm outflow. There was definitely a boundary or two wafting about in the vicinity of that spin-up.

Once it got dark we headed to Boise City for a Subway sandwich.