After much anticipation, Joey and I finally saw some good storms on our third day of our storm chasing vacation! No tornadoes were in the cards for today, but we saw brief bursts of heavy rain, small hail, gusty winds, an impressive flanking line, and above all, very frequent lightning!
We started out the day in Garden City, Kansas, and decided to head slightly south to the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles to see if we could find some storms there. As a life-long Pacific Northwesterner, I am NOT very knowledgeable about the best atmospheric conditions for severe thunderstorms, but the Storm Prediction Center highlighted a “slight risk” of severe storms for that area and Reed Timmer, a storm-chasing legend in his own right, tweeted that he was heading to the Texas Panhandle. If it’s good enough for Reed Timmer, it’s good enough for us!
Credit: Storm Prediction Center
At around 3 pm while we were still in the Oklahoma Panhandle, we spotted some altocumulus castellanus building over us and decided to stop for a couple shots. Altocumulus castellanus are mid-level (6,500 feet to 20,000 feet) clouds that indicate a high amount of instability in the middle troposphere and are often a harbinger of cumulonimbus clouds – the ones that give us thunderstorms and tornadoes.
After watching them for a little while and taking some cool time lapses, we decided to head further south to chase some storms exploding a little bit north of Amarillo. Though none of these storms turned tornadic, one of them looked pretty darn strong on radar and had a decent “hook echo.” A hook echo a type of radar signature that appears when the downdraft (and precipitation) from a thunderstorm curls around the updraft, and it is indicative of a powerful, rotating supercell.
Here are the reflectivities (1st pic) and velocities (2nd pic) from this storm. Most of you are probably familiar with reflectivities from radar, but velocities are more important when trying to find supercell thunderstorms because they can show how fast hydrometeors (a fancy name for rain, hail, snow, etc) are traveling to or moving away from the radar. If you see a concentrated area where hydrometeors are both moving to and away from the radar, that means that a storm is rotating and is capable of producing a tornado. Though this storm had a clear hook echo, the radial velocities weren’t that impressive, and that is likely why it did not spawn a tornado. It did have reports of a wall cloud and 2.5 inch hail though!
Retrieved with NOAA Weather and Climate Toolkit
Retrieved with NOAA Weather and Climate Toolkit
On our trek to reach this storm, some other relatively smaller storms sprung up in our path. Of course, relatively is the key word here – pretty much all these storms had severe thunderstorm warnings for quarter-sized hail and wind gusts up to 60 mph. Unfortunately, I forget the name of the town, but the storm below was somewhere in the southern Oklahoma/north Texas Panhandle. We got a little nervous seeing this thing headed straight for us, so we decided to head south to escape any possible hail.
As we traveled south, the storm looked very dark, and we got a good gust of straight-line winds, perhaps from a gust front or weak microburst. It was fun seeing tumbleweeds, well, tumble across the road at this time!
After we got to a safe spot, we stopped to admire some of the storm structure. But perhaps the craziest thing we saw there was this giant beetle! And yes, I found one of these on the back of my neck later that night – it was not a pleasant experience.
After resuming our drive east, we came across another strong storm that caught our attention.
The most interesting thing about this storm was some weird feature beneath it. It looked like a wall cloud protruding from the base of the storm and air was feeding into it, but it didn’t appear to be rotating like a wall cloud would.
After watching this for a while, we were treated with a beautiful sunset.
Continuing our drive east, we came across another interesting feature – one I hadn’t seen before. There appeared to be a “hole” in one of these storms. I don’t know what it means – but it was sure interesting to see.
After the sun set, we were treated to a vivid lightning display – I had never seen so much lightning in such a short amount of time.
Finally, here’s a neat video Joey created.
Alright, gotta go! We are chasing a supercell right now… I need to help Joey navigate. We should have a lot more to talk about in tomorrow’s blog!