Incredible chase day yesterday and a perfect example of why you chase setups which aren’t “outstanding” for chasing. Pure Caprock magic for storms happened yesterday in true form where the storm of the day struggled to get organized and as soon as it was approaching the caprock and in to much better moisture, a boundary in play, and we get an incredible tornado event.
We intercepted a tornado at extremely close range, rushing down the road to get ahead of it and an incredible show as it plowed through empty fields and damaged nothing but a few power poles as far as we could tell. Just the way we like to see tornadoes. Free range tornadoes with no loss of life or property! While that tornado was still ongoing another fairly decent cone tornado also came down to the east of the first tornado.
Earlier there was a long snaky, rope tornado the formed while we were repositioning and we only saw the very end as it died. We didn’t even get to get a picture. There was a big multi-vortex dirt spinup that happened even earlier, but the jury is still out on that whether or not it was a giant gustnado or tornadic spinup until we have time to go back and evaluate that video later. If it was tornadic, that made a total of 4 tornado intercepts yesterday!
We ended up in what I called a big chaser clusterSTUCK with many storm chasers on some really slick muddy roads and everyone going into the ditch. We somehow managed to stay out of the ditch, and helped some others keep out of it, but ended up stopping and scraping mud out of the wheelwells because it packed in so tight the tires would no longer turn.
We made it out but it took nearly $20 in quarters and an hour at the car wash to get all that mud out. It will probably never be perfectly clean again!
There will be more video when we have time, but we are out now waiting for convention to fire in Northwest Texas/western Oklahoma!