Just finished up editing lightning photos from the chase night before last across West Texas and Eastern New Mexico. Fun, but long day, despite the lack of anticipated severe weather and flooding rains. It was nice to finally get a shot at some local lightning photography!
You can view all the photos and the chase story here. All the photos there can be clicked on for a larger size!
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:
