Yesterday was our sad journeys home. I dropped Kathryn off at the Lubbock airport around 4:15 or so and then pointed the car west towards home. I am sure I will write more about it at some point, but for now, we’ve returned to our normal lives. All said and done, I chased around 7463 miles in 6 states on this round.
I am slowly updating this blog with all the new information- I finally made a page for the 2022 storm chase and will be making one for the 2023 storm chase, both of which will be under the “Past Chases” tab. I hate referring to 2023 as “past chase” as it means it’s over.
Central New Mexico weather posts will begin again tomorrow for a few days. I will be leaving for a cross-country trip later this week, though I won’t be storm chasing.
Yesterday was a tough chase. We knew it would be our last chase, and that there was an Enhanced Risk and 5% Tornado Ring in place.
We started the day in Lubbock. We had a quick breakfast with another Hokie storm chaser friend of ours and then headed south. The idea was that there were two threat areas today- one from Fort Stockton, TX, south to the Mexican border, and the other between Midland and Lubbock. Based on our schedules, we only really had time to chase the Lubbock threat. It also had slightly better parameters, though the computer models did show a cell popping near Fort Stockton and that ended up verifying, producing a tornado that was well out of play for us.
We played the more northern threat. We were on a tornado-warned storm, and it looked good for a few minutes, but it quickly became disorganized.
Storms fired quickly, with too much forcing in our area. This lead to a clustered mess that died out quickly and added to the flash flooding hazard. South of Andrews, TX, we decided it was a losing battle. On the side of the road, we said our goodbyes to Andrew, Harry, Alex and Allison, who turned towards Abilene, while Kathryn and I ducked west and circled behind the line of marginally severe storms.
Kathryn and I had a nice dinner in Seminole, TX, and then returned to the Lubbock La Quinta for our final night.
The SPC shows several tornado reports in the south. We were unable to see the tornado at the edge of New Mexico and Texas, thanks to the rain.
Yesterday was our first hard bust in a long time. I define a “bust” as when we thought there would be storms and there were no storms.
The SPC has an Enhanced Risk and a 5% Tornado Threat ring in place. Based on this, we thought we were in good shape. We had a visible outflow boundary on satellite imagery, plus several other boundaries that were going to interact somewhere between Seminole and Gail, TX.
Once again, we woke up under an Mesoscale Convective System (MCS) that kept the cloud cover thick. We drove southwest and escaped it, after a nice breakfast and a trip to Costco. In Seminole, we found a fantastic coffee shop (Star Coffee Lounge), which had an outdoor patio and a view of the clouds.
A few storms cumulus clouds fired, but then quickly died. Post-analysis among the group, we think there was some convergence aloft, leading to some sinking air. Furthermore, the sinking air dried out the mid-levels (according to the 0Z MAF sounding).
Time for my 160th week of weather station data. I am using Ambient Weather’s interface this week.
The high temperature of 86.0 F occurred on Wednesday afternoon. We had a low temperature of 48.2 F on Monday morning. The dewpoints ranged from 54.3 F to 13.9 F. The dewpoints fell off drastically for the weekend.
There was no precipitation last week. This chart has been excluded from today’s post.
The strongest winds and the strongest gust (29.8 mph) occurred on Tuesday.
The high pressure was 30.04 in Hg (~1017 mb) on Monday morning, and the lowest pressure was on Saturday afternoon, dropping down to 29.82 in Hg (~1010 mb).
The solar charts show variable cloudiness every day this past week. Sunday was the only day that might have been cloud-free.
The particle count peaked at 47 µg/m3 on Saturday, with another lower peak on Friday.
We started the day under rainy, cloudy, gross skies in Dumas. However, we did catch up to our old meteorology professor, Dave Carroll, who was leading a trip to the Rocky Mountains, unrelated to storms.
The SPC has a Slight Risk for severe weather and a 5% Tornado Threat Ring already in place for a good chunk of eastern New Mexico, so I targeted Portales, based on the sinking and potentially stalled outflow boundary and some slight clearing on visible satellite imagery.
The heavy cloud cover was an issue for most of the day. We needed to break free of the clouds, so we headed southwest towards Clovis, and then south to Portales. In Portales, we talked to several locals about storms, as we were hard to miss. A mom and two kids had lots of questions for us, so we stayed there for a while, chatting with them.
Storms began to fire on the front range again today. We jogged a little west to meet one of the storms, and then threaded the needle between it and a storm that formed to our southeast.
Overall, there was virtually no capping inversion. This led to every updraft getting into and using up the available energy. We had a mess of storms that eventually lost their severe warnings. Instead, they produced flash floods for some areas, but were otherwise unimpressive.
We had a nice, sit-down dinner at Olive Garden, and then went to the Days Inn South in Lubbock, which has been kinda trash.
It was windy, so my hair ripped out of several hair ties, and so I just let it loose. Disaster followed.
The SPC did show several brief tornadoes in New Mexico, but none at our location.
This was our route:
…and here was my route according to APRS.fi. It didn’t capture most of our adventure. I’m not sure APRS is really a thing anymore.
We started the day under some cloud cover in Colby, KS. I drove north slightly to play with radio in a county I missed the day before. Then, we headed south towards our target area, Spearman, TX.
Yesterday was likely supposed to be the day with the least chances of severe storms. There was an outflow boundary drifting southward into humid air over the Texas Panhandle, and we knew that was about our only shot for severe weather today. Our “dark horse” play was southeastern Colorado (which did produce a tornado…that we missed), but the northern Texas Panhandle looked like a more solid play.
Along the way, we stopped for lunch under a relatively healthy cumulus field. However, as we continued south, the cumulus clouds melted away and died in the capping inversion. We picked out a hotel in Dumas, TX, where we knew the rest of our crew was staying, as well as our old meteorology instructor.
We stayed at the hotel for a few minutes, though some storms were firing off the Front Range in New Mexico and Colorado. At 5:30 PM or so, we decided to drive out and meet the storms. While they did not remain severe warned for long, and were not very well organized, they did produce a scenic shelf cloud and lots of lightning.
One quick selfie before we headed back northeast.
We watched them just across the border in New Mexico (at Russell’s Travel Center) and then drifted back into Texas. Along our ride back to the hotel, we went through the dying storm’s shelf cloud, driving through heavy rain and wind.
The SPC did show several brief tornadoes in Colorado, but none at our location.
This was our route:
…and here was my route according to APRS.fi. It didn’t capture most of our adventure.
We started the day in Dalhart, TX, and headed north. We knew our chances of storms were quite low, but we tried anyhow. Looking at the surface data, the best combination of ingredients was to our north. We originally said Nebraska was too far, but we ended up driving into the southern part of it anyhow.
I played with amateur radio along the way. I made contacts from several new counties, knocking out most of western Kansas and a few in western Nebraska.
Once we reached I-70, we decided to go after a few cells that were starting to fire in southwestern Nebraska. We knew we wouldn’t make it far enough north to get the cells that were firing over the Sand Hills (and Kathryn hates chasing the Sand Hills), though these cells didn’t produce, either.
We stopped at a park in Wallace, NE, and watched the storms develop. Once again, we were in a situation where a single, discrete cell was ahead of a line of storms, just like we had the day before. However, both the line and the discrete cell were not very well organized.
We stopped a few times to take pictures of the shelf cloud that marked the leading edge of the approaching squall line.
The cell never really rotated and was very high based. We watched it get absorbed, having never really been photo-worthy. After driving through the leading edge of the squall line (non-severe), we drove down to Colby, KS, for the night.
The rain was heavy and there was some pea-sized hail, but no real problems. Once the line had mostly passed the highway, we continued southwest on US-54, headed to our hotel in Dalhart, TX.
The SPC did not show any tornadoes today, nationwide. We expected this, so I can’t call it a bust.
This was our route:
…and here was my route according to APRS.fi. It didn’t capture most of our adventure.
This week, I chose a visible image over the southern Great Plains.
In this image, you can see several storms firing in the Texas Panhandle, with an impressive outflow boundary radiating from them. Notice the circle of clouds that is moving away from them in all directions.
This outflow boundary became the focus of storm development (including a tornado that I caught) later that afternoon.
We started the day in Lubbock, TX, under cloudy skies. When I started loading the car, it was still drizzling. However, a few miles north, the skies cleared. We targeted Liberal, KS, initially.
The day, according to the Storm Prediction Center (SPC), was a Slight Risk with a 2% Tornado Threat Ring. Along our trip north, they dropped the 2% ring, leaving the entire country in “less than 2%” chance. Even so, Kathryn pointed out a Mesoscale Convective Vortex (MCV) that was pulling in moisture from the southeast. At the time, there were no real storms with this, but we knew there was a boundary sagging southeasterly from southeastern Kansas that may interact with the MCV. She talked about a “surprise” tornado outbreak in 2016 that occurred based on a similar setup. We continued chasing.
After a nice lunch in Amarillo, we continued north. A few cumulus clouds bubbled to our south and we almost stayed in Amarillo (or jogged south). If we had, we might have caught that southern tornado.
Once we reached Guymon, OK, we stopped and had a nice walk at the park while we waited for storms to fire. One fired to our east and sat in place for quite some time. We drove over to meet it. At the same time, a line of storms was forming along the KS/CO/OK tri-state border.
We quickly zipped ahead of the single cell, and then parked on a hill to watch it develop and attempt to get organized. It was still high-based, but showed good structure off and on.
We drifted back west a few streets and met up with Alex, Harry and Andrew, as well as Allison, who had arrived in Oklahoma City a few hours earlier. They were watching the same storm. We caravaned with them for an hour or two, checking out the storm from different vantage points. It looked like it was rotating a few times, but couldn’t seem to stay organized. It was also moving into an environment of less favorable conditions (lower dewpoints).
A radar image of the cell:
Ultimately, Kathryn and I decided to bail on this storm, as new storms were developing to our southwest. The storm we were on was disorganized and high-based, and we didn’t have high hopes for the new ones, but one of them sat in place near where we knew there was a boundary. When we turned southwest on US-54 in Guymon, we could see the newest two cells. One had “sharp angles” as we like to say, which is unofficially correlated to good storm development.
As we were approaching Stratford, TX, the southernmost storm became much more organized.
It dropped a tornado, and we were about five miles away to watch it. Being on the west side, we had good lighting to see it all. Often, this position is not desirable, as the rain wraps behind it, but today it worked out. We played tag with the tornadic cell, taking pictures and video (will be released later this summer) along the way. We watched this tornado birth to death, tornadogenesis to roping out.
A radar image of our position and the tornadic cell, as well as the approaching squall line:
The whole time, the squall line was approaching from the northwest, and would soon gobble up this tornadic cell. We also needed to stay ahead of it to avoid the rain and hail. Unfortunately for us, the line had wrapped around through Dalhart, cutting off our route. We had been tracking this, and we could see that the line was weakening, so we parked behind some large concrete silos and waited out the weak spot in the line. While we were there, we took a few photos of the approaching squall line and wall cloud.
Photo Credit: Kathryn Prociv
The rain was heavy and there was some pea-sized hail, but no real problems. Once the line had mostly passed the highway, we continued southwest on US-54, headed to our hotel in Dalhart, TX.
Lessons learned:
Don’t give up, just because the SPC has dropped an outlook. For their purposes, this system still verified (very isolated storm coverage means very limited risk rings).
Don’t underestimate the interaction between an MCV and a boundary.
Don’t be afraid to walk away from the group. There are a lot of people who were in the traditional southeastern quadrant of this storm, and they all have low-contrast images.
The SPC did show our tornado in the northern part of the state. I’ve heard it called the Cactus tornado and the Stratford tornado.
This was our route:
…and here was my route according to APRS.fi. It didn’t capture most of our adventure.
We started the day in Amarillo, TX, and headed southwest towards Clovis, NM. For those out chasing this year, Clovis has been the hub for all storm chasing, and there are quite a few memes about it.
Along the way, we noted how US-60 had been underwater in parts between Hereford, TX, and Clovis, NM. There were still stranded vehicles on both sides of the road, and piles of hail plowed out of the way.
We were under heavy cloud cover, even when we arrived in Clovis. We needed to get out of the clouds and into the sun. We dove south to Portales, where some clearing had been occurring, though it was still quite cloudy. We also were tracking a boundary that was slowly moving south, and the satellite image had a few shear rolls on it as well.
In the park, we met up with our friends Charles and Kathy Peek, and chatted with them as the skies started to clear.
We left the park and continued southwest towards Roswell, as the first storms began to fire. There were three cells that had clustered near each other, but each still had some definition.
We watched these storms, and retreated back northeast several times. They began to merge into a line, and we knew that when the low-level jet kicked in later in the afternoon, they’d turn into a mess.
Instead, we went east to get ahead of the line.
We pulled over at a senior center in Dora, NM, to evaluate.
From Morton, TX, we could see that there was a cell developing in a favorable environment at the south end of the line. It was still semi-discrete, and moving into rich dewpoints. It became our new target and the focus for the rest of the chase day.
We drove down one dry, dirt road (which was rare this season!) as the storm began to organize.
We repositioned several times to avoid the hail core and the lightning. Each time, we’d stop and take more photos. The following aren’t in any particular order. At one point, there was a tornado on this, which we saw, though it was brief and far away, and I don’t think we have photos or video of it. Charles Peek, Mike Olbinski and a few others that were close to it saw it, however.
I took a few images of my crew and occasionally my car while we were on this storm:
It did have a giant inflow stinger near sunset, but the cell itself was dying.
We took one last selfie before heading east and northeast:
At its peak, the storm looked something like this on radar. We didn’t have consistent data, so I only have a few screen grabs of radar.
As the sun set, we watched the storm begin to lose definition. Another storm formed to our north, and was going to race us to our target for the night, Lubbock, TX. Even though we knew the severe warning on it would probably drop, we wanted to beat it to the hotels so that we were not fighting flooded roadways or unloading the cars in the pouring rain. After a stop at Braum’s for dinner, we made it there just ahead of the dying cell.
The SPC did show our Tatum, NM, tornado on their storm reports. We were just across the border n Texas.
This was our route:
…and here was my route according to APRS.fi. It didn’t capture anything outside of Amarillo or Lubbock.
High Plains Chasing 
6/3/23: Travel Day
Yesterday was our sad journeys home. I dropped Kathryn off at the Lubbock airport around 4:15 or so and then pointed the car west towards home. I am sure I will write more about it at some point, but for now, we’ve returned to our normal lives. All said and done, I chased around 7463 miles in 6 states on this round.
I am slowly updating this blog with all the new information- I finally made a page for the 2022 storm chase and will be making one for the 2023 storm chase, both of which will be under the “Past Chases” tab. I hate referring to 2023 as “past chase” as it means it’s over.
Central New Mexico weather posts will begin again tomorrow for a few days. I will be leaving for a cross-country trip later this week, though I won’t be storm chasing.
Thank you for reading my post.