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 Chase Summary: May 5, 2002 (Tour 1: Day 10)

Key: AMA = Amarillo, TX; ABI = Abilene, TX

        Our tour group began the day in ABI and left at noon heading northwest with an initial target of Childress-Clarendon-Claude where we intended to monitor obs until things became clearer. By about 21z the observations showed two distinct regions of moist SE flow: one pointing to the region just south of AMA into developing convective elements SW of town and another area of intensifying severe thunderstorms to the north of AMA. I had by this time realized that my earlier forecast regarding the strength of the cap was ludicrously pessimistic and now the question was which region of initiation to play? A couple of radar/visible satellite imagery downloads showed that the storms north of AMA comprised the dominant cluster at the time but also suggested that significant supercells would eventually develop somewhere SW of AMA. The evolving storms east of Dumas were also clearly at the nose of a south-southeasterly flow field as inferred from radar/satellite. We sat at Claude for a few moments trying to decide which scenario to play. Then, through breaks in the low-level stratocumulus field, we got a glimpse of the incredible convective tower associated with the rapidly intensifying Sunray supercell that Roger Hill was on (and reporting rapid wall cloud rotation with at the time via cell phone). There was no question at all by that point. I could see no advantage to sitting around waiting for a dominant southern storm to emerge (bird in the hand, etc...) when there was a perfectly fine convective evolution occurring just to our north still within our general target area. So, off we went on 207N, forever abandoning our wait-and-see strategy for a southern play. By the time we got north of Stinnett we knew that we were going to be behind this storm due to the sparse road network east of the northern Texas panhandle caprock. Nonetheless, we decided to get as close to the storm as the roads would allow. Splitting off of 136 onto 207 N, we saw the base of the storm for the first time. There as a large rapidly rotating cloud base (the back side of a vicious mesocyclone) and wrapping rain/hail curtains. Roger's video clearly shows a large black tornado at and just prior to this time. It turns out that our dashboard-mounted video camera also captured about a minute of this 1/4 mile wide tornado! We met up with Roger who was driving solo a matching white van (just minutes after he reported seeing the large dust-filled tornado several miles east of Pringle) and all of us headed east on Ranch 281 but remained north of the storm with no visibility of the mesocyclone or any other structure.  Hail was covering the roadway and ground on either side of the road with hail fog reducing visibility to less than 1/2 mile at times! We finally reached Hwy 70 and blasted south to get ahead of the storm, a maneuver that had us punching south through the hook. The low-level rotation was fairly broad and disorganized at this time with no tornado. During the storm's movement eastward off the higher terrain of the caprock, it had evolved from a classic tornadic supercell to an outflow-dominated HP storm. As we drove towards Miami, TX a series of AMA radar downloads showed us the incredible evolution of the Swisher Co. storm which took on an amazing elongated FF core and serious eagle talon hook. It was soooo very large! Vis. satellite revealed that this enormous central Texas Panhandle storm was seeding ours and I surmised that this was one factor that might have pushed our storm to the HP side of the supercell spectrum. We eventually navigated our way around the south and east side of the storm and in Canadian we stopped for gas with the storm just to our NW moving steadily E. During this fuel stop, the storm changed character dramatically. The long laminar wrapping flank now sported a lowered base consisting of cyclonically rotating scud bombs. Apparently, the storm was reorganizing and attaining a very strong low-level mesocyclone just north of town! We quickly went up 60 and then east on FM 2758 out of 
the tiny (ghost) town of Glazier, which luckily led directly to the inflow notch northeast of the swirling, amazingly fluid mesocyclone. We raced along this nice ranch road and peered into the center of the mesocyclone and associated inflow notch which revealed an amazing array of dynamic processes: inflow 'stogies' racing in from the NW, N and NE; a compact circular wall cloud with amazing cloud base rotation; converging scud tags/bombs consolidating beneath the base; the whole works. As we outflanked the intensely rotating thunderstorm, sporadic vapor thin funnel clouds condensed and then disappeared rapidly beneath the spinning dervish of a cloud base while the entire region of circulation strengthened and tightened, the whole time approaching us. We were essentially playing cat and mouse! It got to the point where I could not imagine this storm not producing a full fledged tornado and that is what it finally did. A large cone tornado formed quickly in the rural ranch land just to our WSW about 1/2-3/4 mile south of the road and moved steadily towards us as tourists and tour guides scampered up the hill side to watch. We watched the tapered cone swirl and approach us, the tornado funnel visible all the way upwards into the updraft hole clefted away by the occlusion downdraft. We quickly moved east and stopped again, peering down into the valley floor as the tornado entered its rope-out stage, leaving this amazing cigar-shaped funnel aloft and a neat dynamic ground-based circulation beneath with red clay swirling around and being blasted in various directions by ground-level inflow jetlets. At one point the ground-based circulation got close enough to where we could hear the tornado, which was emitting a medium-pitched hiss. I could see some object that looked for all the world like a cow doing revolutions and flopping end over end at the base of the tornado! Perhaps it was just a cattle feeder but it was amazing nonetheless! The tornado eventually died and another brief spinup occurred just to the WNW beneath a fully occluded mesocyclone to the WNW of the original updraft. This was tornado #2. We blasted ahead to the E and NE into Oklahoma along SSR 46, eventually cutting ahead of the storm southbound on Highway 34 (out of Vici, OK) and stopped at Camargo. The lightning was totally ridiculous with anvil zits and huge beaded positive and negative polarity bolts coming from the sides of the updraft and the anvil. The thunder itself was a Hollywood-like marvel, with eruptions sounding like Civil War cannons! Never heard anything like it! As we sat on the south side of town, we could see an amazing beaver tail screaming into the storm from the ENE and eventually a large, ominous wall cloud came over a rise in the terrain west of town. It was too dark (and our night vision too ruined) to make out any tornadoes beneath but the storm definitely had that look. Not wanting to get caught in a tornadic circulation that we couldn't clearly see at night, we headed east on a paved county road from Camargo marveling the whole while at one of the most intense and incredible ligthing displays any of us had ever seen. We eventually went up to Seiling because we were all running low on fuel. As we fueled and used the facilities, the core of the ever-encroaching tornadic supercell overtook us and hail up to 1" in diameter started to fall with stone size increasing steadily in size and intensity. Not wanting to be caught in town in a tornadic storm at night, we bolted SE and followed the storm for an additional 30 minutes, stopping for some tripoded lightning video in the vault to our NE. We later found out that a damaging tornado destroyed a trailer home just east of Seiling moments after we escaped! What a way to end a 10-day storm chasing adventure for several storm-hungry tourists who had to travel as far as NW Mississippi to get a glimpse of some 60 mph elevated hailstorm. Great day!

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