Day 4 Chase Sumary

Supercells, Lightning Show

Guymon, OK to Canadian, TX to Pampa, TX to Canyon, TX to Plainview, TX

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Another great day of storms. After we stopped in Canadian for lunch, we did a data check and decided to re-route further to the South West, and abandon heading for Childress, as the storms were firing up late in SW Texas/ New Mexico, and didn't look like getting up to the Childress area until after dark.

We then took the I-40 down through Pampa, through Amarillo, and into Canyon for another pit-stop. Big, big cells were now firing down to the south west of our location, tracking north-east. We deceided on Plainview to book in for the night, as it was now past 5pm, and we'd chase from there after reserving rooms at the Best Western.

After getting to the hotel, we parked up and noticed a huge anvil off to the south east, and a big line of towers shooting up to the south.

Anvil to our east

Storms moving up from the South

We elected to stay put and watch the situation develop at the hotel for a while. At that time a tornado watch was in effect for the whole of the area we were in, and there were reports of lowerings from the cloud base of the storm to our east from other spotters in the area. This storm was tracking north-east, taking it to the north of our current location.

The GRLevel3 radar then indicated that the storm to the east had split into two cells. This has the effect of firstly de-intensifying the two "child" storms, as they compete against each other for available energy, but also more often than not means that the southern-most storm takes a dive to the right rather than following its previous track. Further radar analysis showed that this was indeed occuring, and the potentially tornadic storm was coming straight for us.

It was then that we noticed that a wall cloud had decended from the meso :

This got our attention as tornadoes can form under these structures, and as it moved toward us we saw several lowerings that just didn't quite make it into tornadoes:

The right veering supercell was then caught by the line of storms to the south, which effectively wiped out any chance of anything more developing from the wall cloud, and it got a bit messy for a while, as we got pea-sized hail and lightning. The collection of cells then moved away north, and we had clear air.


But another gaggle of strong cells were moving up from the south west for about 10pm, so just enough time for some Chinese takeaway before a memorable lightning show commenced. CC and CG lightning was almost constant for a couple of hours after dark - some incredible strikes (even I managed to get some shots with my basic still camera). A late night to bed, but an early start in the morning - massive potential in southern OK and NE Texas tomorrow!