June 3, 2007
Storm Chase
Our crew had a good lunch at IHOP and did some shopping in Lubbock and headed south towards Odessa for today's target. It was a nice and easy day with little travelling. We were expecting today to be similar to the storms from the other night, with the cap breaking later in the day.
As we were heading further south, we saw darkening skies off to the southwest around 2 pm. I noted a couple of inflow bands, one coming from the east and the other coming from the north. Baron had detected 2 inch hail and the updrafts were increasing. There were quite a few CGs and some positive strikes as well. Sandra had noted that the temperature dropped 6 degrees a half hour later. We had crossed a boundary.
Behind this little storm was a larger supercell that had popped up on radar around a quarter after four on the New Mexico/Texas state border and was due east. A tornado warning had been issued. We went through Odessa and took highway 302 westward. We saw the Tornado Intercept Vehicle once again on this trip, parked on an overpass. A wall cloud appeared just west of town.
Ron noted that this storm had become a right mover... oh boy! Things were going to get interesting. We actually had trouble finding a good viewing spot to get ourselves in position. A bunch of desert trees were in the way. Trying to watch a wall cloud with tornado potential through all that was quite frustrating. About 10 minutes later, we parked at a good viewing spot. At around a quarter to five, all of a sudden we saw it... a wedge shaped tornado! Holy crickey! I've never seen one this big before so this was definitely new to me. According to Ron, this was approx 20 km away from where we were, so the tornado must have been almost three quarters of a mile wide. We got reports on the radio that a sheriff had reported a tornado on the storm. Wow... okay so we weren't seeing things afterall! The tornado went from a wedge shape to a stovepipe and then fizzled out a couple minutes later. I was really glad that it hit somewhere in the middle of nowhere on a county line and not right in town.
After all that excitement, we continued a little more east to get some structure shots. Wow what beautiful undercut wall cloud structure. There was actually blue colours in the undercut area! We watched this for a good several minutes as it came towards us and got great imagery.
Since the core in behind was coming this way, we decided to head south, closer to town, to get into a bit of hail. We stopped on the side of the highway and watched in amusement as one inch stones pounded the vehicles and accumulated on the ground in some spots. The road was pretty much covered in the stuff before the rain came.
After that, we decided we were pretty pleased with what we caught today and headed to our hotel in Odessa. We had a beer and steak dinner at the restaurant located in the hotel but the overall quality was somewhat mediocre. Half of the steaks were not cooked right and they weren't as tender and lean as other steaks we've had several days ago. Plus it took forever to get our food and our tickets. The place wasn't even busy. We managed to get a free drink on the house for the poor steak quality and then waited and waited for our tickets. Dave went up twice asking for our tickets, but somehow the manager couldn't figure it out. After waiting too long, we gave up and left.
Tomorrow it looks like we are headed right down the highway not too far from here. I must say that Ron's uncanny when it comes to predicting storms right down to a highway.
