Some horses decided to entertain us as we sat off I-27 northwest of Tulia.
Nasty mud from Texas' secondary roads. My Taurus would never be able to handle that.
This would mark my first October chase, my first October tornado, and my first Texas tornado!
This system was seen coming days in advance. Shear was to be fantastic, and moisture quality was to be rare for October. As it happened, surface dewpoints of 70 degrees made it as far north as northern Oklahoma and as far west as central Texas. Mid-upper 60s dewpoints made it all the way to the TX-NM border. That's fantastic! But of course, no setup goes without some potential pitfalls. The biggest one for this day would be the late arrival of the good lift and shear. As it verified, no dryline ever made it into Texas that day. In fact, it hardly even made it halfway through New Mexico. The system slowed down, but there was just enough decent flow in the mid-levels to make for supercell shear.
I headed west from Norman with Ben Holcomb and a number of other people in a two-car caravan including Danny Neal and Adam Lucio. As we drove on I-40 towards the Texas border, we drove through an outflow boundary created by overnight convection in the TX panhandle. The air in this cold pool was amazingly cold and stubborn. Throughout the day it kept oozing southward, pinching off the area of good instability that wasn't capped, and also pushing us farther south. Whereas we'd had an initial target of Dalhart the night before, we turned immediately south from Amarillo towards Lubbock instead. It wasn't until we reached about Plainview before we got back into the warm, moist air. Finally the OFB started to retreat slowly during the mid-afternoon, but its progress south really put a damper on the mood. Even as of about 3 PM, it was starting to become doubtful that initiation would happen since there was no obvious surface boundary other than the OFB, and surface temperatures were struggling through the mid-70s. The area was just covered in clouds.
While some chasers were flying west into NM to get closer to the dryline and better dynamics, I convinced everyone to sit along the OFB. A few weak updraft pulses had been trying to erupt to the northwest, so that got everybody a little more excited. However, none of those could really sustain themselves. Nonetheless, we drove north to Tulia, where we waited for awhile.
As 5 PM came and went, what was left of my hopes for activity this day asymptotically approached zero. I turned to Ben, finally, and said, "wanna go home?" He said, "just wait."
I'm glad we did.
In a matter of one or two scans on KLBK, two storms exploded to our south, just northwest of Lubbock, presumably since that area reached its convective temperature, which RUC soundings showed to be about 80 F. Places at and south of Lubbock did exceed 80. After watching another scan to make sure the storms sustained themselves, we booked it south on I-27 towards them. The storms continued to quickly gain strength and became supercellular. Several splits and mergers occurred as we began punching through cores. After we got south of Plainview, the southernmost storm - our target storm - came into view. We had to punch through from the north, though.
We took the core of our storm at exit 27. Rainfall intensified, then became mixed with small hail. The small hail got bigger. For a few minutes we experienced very heavy rain and hail, with the largest stones about 1" in diameter. After the heavy rain abated, the hail grew even larger. Eventually we found ourselves in the midst of a large hail barrage. The biggest stones were probably knocking on the door of baseball size, but they were soft, breaking apart on impact with the ground. Thus, despite several hitting Ben's truck, he took no serious damage...not even a windshield crack.
The hail roar from that core was amazing. After the last stones fell, we collected some and took measurements. The whole time it sounded like a busy air force base was conducting operations to our northeast. I've never heard a hail roar quite so loud before.
As the core of the storm was now to our east, some funky structure emerged to our south. There appeared to be a poorly organized wall cloud in the mess of ground hugging scud, but nothing was imminent. Some rotation became evident as the storm got a few miles east of us. Since you can see forever around you there, it was fairly easy to make out the rotation even given the distance. We hopped on a farm-to-market road and chased the storm down from the west. As we approached, a region near the lowering began rotating rapidly. For a few minutes it spun like a top, but no obvious funnel clouds or tornadoes occurred. Perhaps some did touch down but we could not see dust or vapor at the ground. At one point we were probably within three quarters of a mile behind the rotation as it crossed the road in front of us. Still no tornado. Finally, as we turned north and got a little ahead of it, it finally put down a brief multiple-vortex tornado to our northwest. It was short-lived, but that made my first tornado in October and in Texas.
The storm slowly disorganized after that. Darkness settled in quickly, and we called off the chase on a farm-to-market road 15-20 miles southeast of Plainview. A very vivid lightning show had commenced as the storm was supercellular, and continued well after we ended the chase. CGs were striking so frequently at times I didn't need a long exposure to capture some. I even got a few CGs without a tripod (although they're a little fuzzy)! As it got darker, I pulled out my tripod and took a number of stills, getting several very nice CGs from miles away. These shots are probably my best to date. My only regret is not zooming in more on some of them.
In summary, this chase was not overwhelmingly serious or successful, but for October, and for occurring well after I thought my 2012 chase season had concluded, this was an enjoyable trip.
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