I am running way behind on my posting, work and everything else that needs to be done.
My morning started off with a bang. I dropped my PLASTIC pill container and it shattered the sink.
We woke up under borderline severe storms and murky skies in Elk City. We needed to get out of the muck and into sunny skies, so we targeted southeastern New Mexico and southwestern Texas, looking for where the clouds would break.
Around Lubbock, the skies started to clear. By the time we got to Seminole, TX, the jackets we donned in the morning went into the trunk, as it was hot and humid.
Storms began to fire in eastern New Mexico. At first, they were really dusty.
A few cells fired to our east, and we debated chasing them due to the crispness of the updrafts. Instead, we opted for the cells to our west, as they were headed for us.
Eventually, the storms became more organized. Between Eunice, NM, and Jal, NM, we ended up catching a storm with a low wall cloud. We played tag with it several times, but it couldn’t seem to spin up.
This storm was nuts. The lightning threat was almost more than I was comfortable chasing. Constant, close cloud-to-ground strokes. I saw several tour groups setting up tripods, and I admit to getting a bit nervous.
We got stuck in the truck traffic around Jal as the storms merged into a Mesoscale Convective System (MCS). We ducked south through Kermit and then headed northeast on I-20. By this time, the storm was virtually unchaseable, as it had merged into a mess. Reports on social media showed accumulations of small hail in Andrews, TX, to our north.
We had dinner at a Whataburger. Soon after our food arrived, the store lost power due to the wind.
We stopped for the night at a ridiculously fancy Super 8 in Midland, TX.
This was our route:
Part of the way through this day, the antenna broke on the APRS system. There was really no reason for its failure, so I’ll probably try to get it replaced soon. There are no more APRS tracks for this storm chase.
Thank you for reading my post.
High Plains Chasing 