Hi all,
After the awesome day in Kansas, another day set up in the NE Texas panhandle. We dropped S from Hays and got data at various spots on the way S to try and pick where convection would initiate. We decided that the NE panhandle would be the place to be and within minutes of deciding this, the first towers broke the cap. Within 30 minutes, the storms were warned for baseball hail. Talk about rapid explosions! We managed to squeeze between two of the 4 cells just as one of them became tornado warned. We drove under its flanking line with the wall cloud not far off to our N. This cell had a decent crack at trying to put one down but we didn't see anything connect with the ground.
The next cell down the line (the beast!) quickly went HP and cycled over the next 4 hours producing numerous wall clouds which were rapidly wrapped up in rain and large hail. You could try and get in the notch and see if it was going to produce or you could actually wait behind the wrap around and after about 10 minutes or so, the rain/hail wrap around would clear and the wall cloud would come in to view again...although at this point it was fully wrapped in cooler air. There have been several reports of tornadoes from a handful of chasers who were in the notch and we probably have video of several funnel clouds but we stayed out of the hail and watched from a "safe" distance. Although with this storm, no where within 15km was safe with clear air CG's frequently smashing out well ahead of this storm.
Again the structure was magnificent. I don't know what I'd do without my 10-22mm lense now
.
We eventually blew off this storm just after sunset and headed south to Canadian, Tx to get accomodation as we knew it would be a circus later on to get accom (as has since been evidenced by the Kiwi's having to go all the way to Amarillo). Another storm had developed back down near Borger, Tx before sunset and it soon became the dominant storm. With the strong shear and dynamics in place, this storm quickly became tornado warned. We decided to watch from where we were as we were fairly exhausted from the last week of chasing and boy...what a show it put on. Anvil zits/crawlers every 1-2 seconds with overall lightning rates probably in the 2-3 flashes per second vicinity (not quite the 4-5 flashes per second from the previous two nights but still very nice!). The structure we saw pass about 8-10mi to our NW was awesome. A huge bell-shaped meso was evident under this cell and it was no wonder it was tornado warned.
Pics from the day here...
http://macca.bsch.au.com/gallery/20070523Macca & Chris
