In The Vortex

Author: David Drummond

  • 05/05/08 Storm Chase

    Errands completed and hitting the road in just a minute for eastern NM. SPC has issued a Severe Thunderstorm watch for all of Eastern NM east of the Rockie Mountains, and a couple of counties in to western TX. Supercells expected, and couple of tornadoes possible. Convention has already begun with storms underway just east of the mountains.

    I will be heading west toward Lovington, NM and possibly on to Roswell. Not giving up the option to drop south. CAPEs are a little higher down that way, I’ll play it by ear and make adjustments as needed.

    I’ll be running solo, so not sure how often I can update the blog today during the chase. LIVE ChaseCam will be active here shortly. I haven’t chased in eastern NM in a couple of years, so I am not sure how good my data coverage out that way will be. Last time I was out that was, there was none. Coverage has improved greatly, so hopefully I will be surprised. Availability of the LIVE ChaseCam of course will hinge on the ability to get that data connection out in the wild. Hopefully things have improved.

  • 05/05/08 Chase Forecast

    Moisture has finally returned again to west Texas with dewpoints across the South Plains approaching 60F this morning with mid 60s just a short distance away near I20. Was very nice to wake up to something besides dirt in my nose this morning!

    Looks like I will have a couple of severe weather days in my home area here around the South Plains. Today looks ok, tomorrow looks even better. All courtesy of a storm system currently south of California out over the Pacific ocean that will be coming this way across northern Mexico.

    Therein lies the inherent issues with forecasting the next couple of days. Models all week have had trouble with the handling of this system, and it’s affects on weather, and will continue to do so because it will be tracking across areas where it mostly is not going to get sampled by upper air obs stations.

    That said, climatologically it IS May now, and we are going to have 60s dewpoints on the plains, ample heating and southwest flow in the midlevels. A general pattern favorable for severe weather on the plains.

    It appears a dryline will try to take shape in eastern NM today, firing off storms by mid-afternoon, which will advance east into the South Plains. We may have some trouble getting a lot of instability, being that of this writing here at nearly 11 am CDT, the morning low clouds are only now starting to thin out across eastern NM. We could end up with high based storms, depending on how much mixing we get going ahead of the dryline, at least initially. Still, with threats of large hail, damaging winds, and the tornado threat is not zero, although the winds fields, while having adequate directional shear, aren’t particularly impressive with the speeds.

    I know the experimental radar model I looked at brought a chain of cells across the South Plains through the evening and models HAVE been consistent all week breaking out the convection in the area.

    All and all, a chase day in store. I don’t have a specific target just yet. I have a couple of errands to run this morning, but most likely will be headed out for the NM state line somewhere west of Lubbock. Once I get on the road, the LIVE ChaseCam will be up and running this afternoon. Hopefully at the very least, I will get some more chances at lightning after dark!