Category: Extreme Weather

All things Extreme Weather!

  • 04/29/09 Chase Forecast

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    Once again, little time to post a detailed forecast.  A tornado watch has already been issued for parts of west and north central Texas, and I believe this is just the early show.

    Numerous outflow boundaries exist across the Texas South Plains and a dryline is mixing east from New Mexico, with a dryline bulge depicted on models coming out about the Lubbock area, and already starting to see signs of this in a detailed surface hand analysis.  CAPE was looking to maximize on the nose of this dryline bulge so we will be expecting to probably target where that intersects with any outflow boundaries.  Right now I am thinking just east or northest of Lubbock would be a good target.  Fortunately we have a little bit of a target luxury being here at my house already in the area.

    Live ChaseCam should be up and running by mid afternoon.  Could get VERY interesting today!  I’ll also be chasing for KCBD out here as well, so if you live out here, be sure to tune in for our coverage!

  • 04/28/09 Storm Chase Recap

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    Ended up just west of Roswell, New Mexico on a sweet looking LP supercell.  This is one thing I like about chasing eastern New Mexico is the great views and awesome storm structure.  Never really made a good wall cloud or attempts at tornadoes after we got on it, but Bob Schafer who we met up with there said earlier it had a huge wall cloud just dragging the ground.  The way it looked on radar I can believe it!

    After that storm died we went back south of Carlsbad, New Mexico on a supercell along the Texas/New Mexico border that was crawling along.  Road options are sparse out there, and our attempts to take an east west road along the border were foiled by flash flooding washing out the road (always a danger out in these areas) and Texas Longhorn cattle in the road!

    We were able to drop back south and come up towards Jal, NM from the southwest and get in perfect position to view the base as a wall cloud  was forming.  We killed the vehicle lights at sat out on a lonely road for an hour and were the only people out there.  Tons of cloud to ground lighting causing power flashes in the oilfields, illuminating the wall clouds and a nice thin snake like funnel cloud at one point extending almost to the ground (that didn’t come out in pics unfortunately, hopefully the video caught it but I don’t have time to go through it now).  It was quite the surreal experience!

    Storm finally died out near Jal, New Mexico and we headed home!  Some pics from the second storm below:

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