Author: David Drummond

After taking a bit of a break from things, it’s time to get back in the groove of things!

The dryline FINALLY returns to west Texas with a chance of not only some very much needed rainfall, but some rather significant severe weather.

I’ve been watching this day approach in the forecast models all week, and while they have been back and forth with things over the course of this entire week (the week for me being the previous 7 day period), one thing has been consistent, and that has been the development of convention over West Texas on Wednesday.

Right now model solutions show plenty of wind shear, instability and moisture with a bit of a jet overhead to help vent the storms out once they get going.

The one factor that could complicate things is that the models have also been consistently showing some convection overnight on Tuesday which could potentially serve to mess things up for Wednesday.

A frontal boundary will be in the area, and my gut feeling is that if there is any convection overnight Tuesday it will be north of the boundary, which is ok, because we will be keeping an eye on areas south of that boundary. I do NOT think we are going to have the issues we had last week, with the saturation and fog we had to deal with. This should be a much more spring like event.

The one thing that overnight convection could potentially do to help us out would be to lay down some outflow boundaries in the area. A good east-west outflow boundary intersecting the dryline could really enhance storm rotation and tornado potential.

I’ll post more on this as we get closer to the event. I of course will be out chasing this as it is in my backyard, and I will be chasing for KCBD as well. I’ll have the LIVE ChaseCam up and running for you guys as well!

Oh how tired I am. I didn’t get home til about 4 am Thursday morning. This was the first time I have been home since Sunday evening and over 3000 miles on the road since then! I am still exhausted even after sleeping half the day. I am a bit happy we are going to have some Chamber of Commerce weather for a week or so. I need some down time!

Yesterday was mostly a flop. Yes, another one. The upper support didn’t arrive until well after dark, so the only thing that could get going was the elevated crap well north of the front, and a couple of supercells right along the front. The first one went on to produce a tornado that damaged parts of Breckenridge, TX. We were not in position to intercept it, but waited for the later convection in the warm sector.

Finally later in the day, another one erupted along the front and we decided to go after it. Those that were watching the LIVE ChaseCam saw the foggy mess we were in as there was a cold air pool about 500 feet deep north of the front, and while we were right under the updaft base according to the radar, we couldn’t see a darn thing. That was quite unnerving, so we decided no point in staying with that one.

After a bite to eat the dryline blew up all at once, and we decided to get in front of an intense part of it and take some shelter in Sterling City, TX and see what it would bring. Showed a pretty good hail core on it, even though we never saw any, but did sport some winds in the severe catagory. We hoped for some good lightning for photos after it passed, but nothing much to work with.

This squall line went on to become a derecho event that did quite a bit of damage across north Texas during the early morning hours.

All I can say is I will be glad when the May storms get here.

Positives that came from it, we did the first live intro for KCBD that I chase for locally, that went very well, and we had some viewers from livenewscameras.com that were able to chase along with us via the video feed. Sometimes I forget that stuff we take for granted out here (high winds, cloud to ground lightning) isn’t as common as other parts of the world. Mother nature didn’t disappoint with not one but two close CG strikes right in front of the camera!

So welcome all you new folks from livenewscameras.com  Hopefully as the season progresses, we will have MUCH more interesting things to show you on the live feed!

Time to rest up and get caught up on some work now!