Sunday, May 4, 2008

April 23rd, Moderate Risk. NC TX. 5 TX Busts in a row?

Well, you can pretty much sub in the last chase for this one, as it was almost exactly the same. actually, it's been a few weeks and I hadn't written up a report because I thought the last report was for this day.

Randy Rhea and I headed out from Edmond the day before to stay at my Mom's house in Decatur. Later that night, Randy and Lisa(the Outlaw Chasers) showed up. We woke up early to head west towards Breckenridge. DeLorme informed me of an imaginary highway in an imaginary town(W of Albany on TX180), and the storms bright green core was fast approaching, so we ducked S to get in position. There was a nice velocity couplet to the N in the core, and another one to the S. I would have much rather stayed for the N one, but road options made the decision for us. We jogged out ahead of it, and enjoyed some decent structure with an AMAZING lightning display. Stayed out ahead of it through Albany and shot N out of town to watch it come in. Looked like junk the whole time, so we caught the next storm. Also an HP mess, but we had to chase it. Punched through it to see if there was really a tornado. there wasnt, but as we approached the wall cloud, there was a nice needle funnel starting to poke out. It never touched the ground, and we dropped S to weigh our options. We decided that the only cell isolated enough to produce tornadoes was to our E and we let it go. Randy and Lisa went after it and were about 5 minutes behind a strong tornado. We dicked around, got some dinner, went by my Mom's again, then headed back to Edmond. Randy and Lisa stayed at the KGB house in Edmond, and we would discuss chasing in KS the next day.

847 miles. 3 "supercells" that never really looked capable, but thats how TX has treated us so we'll deal with it. However, finding a funnel in that mess of a storm was definitely a good feeling. Eh.

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