Day 2 – An unexpected beauty

Well that was a surprisingly good day. A really really good day. The Storm prediction centre had initially only posted a slight risk up in eastern Kansas into Missouri and Illinois, but 5 hours later, we were on the heels of a hugely impressive supercell in North Texas and what a visual treat it was!

We started the day waiting around for our internet dongle to arrive. We weren’t particularly bothered though, as the outlook didn’t look particularly great. We had decided that if it arrived after 10:30 we wouldn’t have the time and would probably sack off the chase.

But thankfully the dongle arrived before 10am and we were off. The plan was to head due north to Wichita in Kansas, to try and get onto some storms expected to drop big hail across the eastern side of the state.

As we approached Oklahoma city however, the latest model runs were suggesting that the Texas Panhandle would be much better for supercell storms, and showed much higher instability and wind shear than earlier forecasts. My gut said that the conditions there would give us a better chase, so we went for it.

It didn’t fail to deliver. The first storm of the day formed about 2pm directly ahead of us and we watched it grow from nascent cell to a behemoth that filled the sky. The storm was characterised by a high photogenic base, and we got some good positions directly under the updraft.

The storm began to collapse so we went south to pick up the now larger storm that was cutting off our first target’s fuel. The storm was heading south so we kept pace with its leading edge as it really began to intensify. What was fascinating about this storm was that the main updraft base was on its leading edge and it kept transitioning between being outflow dominant (with strong 6omph winds of rain-cooled air blowing out ahead of it) and inflow dominant (warm moist air blowing into the updraft). This made the motion really turbulent and I am confident that if the cloud bases were lower this would have been a tornado producer. We saw some amazing dust whirls and eddies at the front, including a brief gustnado (spinning vortex kicking up dust in front of outflow winds)

We also managed to capture some stunning lightning shots at this time as the storm intensified

At this point our road options started to dry up, as we had the Red River to our south and very few crossing areas. We had to go east before we could drop down. When we did though we were treated to a stunning sight. The updraft had tightened up into a classic horseshoe shape, the classic ‘mothership’ structure a la Independence day. Whats more we even saw what looked to be a brief rope funnel emerge from the northern side just in front of the rain, though I cant confirm a funnel as visibility of it was poor.

As our road options continued to deteriorate, including a closed road in our path as we tried to cut across the base, we had to leave the updraft behind. We headed south to refuel. Noticing the storm was weakening we thought it would be worth it to ‘punch the core’ and sample some hail. Some good 1/2 inch stones were seen as we crawled through the core.

And we were done. We set up camp in Childress, north Texas. Over dinner we were treated by a spectacular sunset show as the sun lit up the storm from below. A great day, lots seen, and probably my best non-tornadic storm I’ve ever seen.