06.15.10

Chase #15 Evaluation and Chase #16

Posted in Severe Weather Forecast at 1:12 pm by Rebekah

On the road again…targeting Texas for the third day in a row.  🙂

(As of the time I am now posting this, 1:10pm, we are between Lawton and Altus on Highway 62, heading west.)

Chase forecast hasn’t changed much the last couple of days…there is less upper-level forcing today, as the trough has lifted.  We don’t have very high expectations of today, but again, hard to resist a chase day in west Texas, especially when it could be the last one for a long time.

Long story short, we’re heading down I-44 and then will go out towards Childress (Texas) and perhaps see how far west we can get.  Today is a bit tricky as far as determining storm initiation location…yesterday’s storms laid down some outflow boundaries that storms today may form along.  There should be some supercells today, but my primary concern at this point is that we may not get to them (at least for a while) as the forecast keeps pushing the storm initiation location further west.

As to yesterday…we drove all over certain parts of west central Texas, chasing a tornado-warned supercell that fell apart as soon as we got on it, chasing another tornado-warned supercell with tennis ball-sized hail that dropped to only quarters when we got on it (did see the most amazing shelf cloud and green sky, though, and got some tiny hail), and later chasing a bow with a great shelf cloud and getting pea-sized hail with extremely strong winds that made my car shudder even as we were parked under shelter.  We saw a beautiful sunset with mammatus clouds, and also saw one of the most incredible lightning displays that I have ever seen…the lightning on the way back to Norman (behind the line) was not that frequent, but when we did see it, there were many tendrils that crawled along the underside of the clouds and occasionally touched the ground.  We’d see a dozen or more both intra-cloud and cloud-to-ground flashes in one several-second display at a time.

More to come in the chase logs later…I probably won’t be updating the chase logs until I get the new website up, but hopefully that will come as soon as the end of this week!!

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