Day 5 3rd Chase Summary

Thunderstorms

Plainview, TX to Gainsville, TX to Alvord, TX to Sunset, TX to Whitesboro, TX to Bonham, TX to Durant OK


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I suppose many seasoned chasers might call it a Bust, as we didn’t get what we set out for in the way of tornadoes, but we did see some excellent-looking storms and some really explosive convection. The biggest disappointment was not what we did see, rather what we just missed out on.

Analysis at Gainsville had us torn between chasing a weak-looking but local cell in Parker county, or heading back west to a cell that had just become tornado warned. We chose the latter, and bombed 40 miles westward toward the tornado-warned cell, but that cell faded rapidly once we were in the area. Meanwhile, our Parker cell had really intensified (we didn’t just need GRLevel to tell us that, we could monster cloud tops back to our east), and dropped a funnel to the ground a little while later. Darn.

We chased back east, flanking some cells that were trundling eastward. Just past Whitesboro we pulled over under blue skies to look at the cells to our north. Suddenly we noticed very rapid convection over our heads with a good deal of rotation. We drove on following this new line of rapidly developing clouds just behind. I’ve never seen such rapid development, and indeed with 10 minutes fully grown cells had developed that were throwing down 1.5” hail. We hung back out of the large stuff, but still witnessed marble sized hail.

All this action was still moving rapidly east, but there was nothing happening in terms of tornadic potential. We bailed at 8pm, as we would loose the light in another half hour or so. We moved north to Durant in OK ready for a reposition north to west KS tomorrow.

A vid of a frustrating day, plus some lightning vid from last night to follow…