In The Vortex

Author: David Drummond

  • 04/22/2010 Chase Recap

    I didn’t even have time to get a forecast post up yesterday.  I was mostly covering severe weather in our viewing area for the TV station, so I wasn’t able to head to the more obvious tornado target in the eastern Texas Panhandle where so many other chasers scored multiple tornadoes.

    The only confirmed tornado on any of the stuff in our viewing area happened out north of Matador and Paducah.  I thought sure we were going to have one there north of Matador, but it waited another 20 miles or so before producing.  I missed it though as I headed back to cover more developing activity by Lubbock.

    All was not lost however as I got some nice lightning lit shots of a supercell out by Spur that looks like it came REALLY close to producing a tornado.  The structure of the storm was outstanding and in one photo it appears we probably had a funnel cloud there as well.  The cold front line of storms caught up with it after that and that was about it!

    You can click on these and get a slightly bigger version.

  • 04/21/2010 Storm Chase Recap

    Best storm of the day got going just NW of Lubbock, TX and matured east of Abernathy.  Had some of the best structure to it I have seen in a quite a while, looking like a bomb had gone off over the West Texas landscape.

    Dropped quite a bit of hail up to golfball size before everything came together as one big complex of storms just off the caprock.  Did find some 2.5″ hail north of Quitaque that had been there for about 15 minutes, so it probably was the baseball size hail that had been reported before it melted  a little.

    Treated to a great sunset once again with the storm towers taking on all sorts of colors as the sun went down!  Was hoping for some lightning shots, but the electrical activity died down as dark set in.

    Another, better shot at chasing today!