June 4, 2002 Lubbock, TX Supercell

A patient wait-and-see strategy paid off this day. Driving late into the night from eastern Colorado the day before, we spent the night in Dalhart, Texas and then continued south to Lubbock, intercepting early severe thunderstorms in progress over the city proper. We played around with one very outflow dominant supercell (theme of the year) moving across the north end of town but we let it go as it moved off the caprock because we just didn't want to play with yet another storm that had little hope of re-generating. This storm produced copious amounts of cold outflow that overspread the region. The plan/hope was that brand new storms would develop by late afternoon near the dryline/outflow boundary intersection (triple point). This was a tenuous hope, however, given that the outflow boundary failed to become stationary but rather slowly but inexorably sunk southward all day long. Nonetheless, we waited at a gas station near Idalou all day long, munching on Subway sandwiches and ice cream. Finally, a storm developed rather suddenly near the triple point southwest of town. We intercepted this young LP supercell updraft west of town, stopping a few miles east of Smyer, TX. Over the course of an hour, the storm morphed into a beautiful bell-shaped updraft with multiple tiers and a flared base.

A beautiful "mothership" updraft with flared base stands out in stark relief against blue sky. Note the intense forward flank core off to the right of the updraft in the image's lower right corner.	The updraft slowly approaches us as we take tripoded time-lapse video of this beast. The storm is able to sustain itself through strong deep-layer inflow ABOVE the shallow outflow cold pool.	As the storm's base approaches our position east of Smyer, TX, we get a warning from Bill Gargan to our west that very strong winds will soon smash us!	Much later that evening, we encounter large hail near Ralls, TX. It was produced by the same storm 2 hours after the previous image was taken!

But, wait - there's more! In the spirit of Paul Harvey, here is the rest of the story. At about the time that we captured image #3 above, Bill Gargan, who was at the time located at Smyer, TX, called me on my cell phone to inform me that he was experiencing 70 mph straight-line winds associated with the storm's intense rear-flank downdraft.. We were stopped along Hwy 114 3.5 miles east of Smyer and upon receiving that report we decided it was time to boogey! We raced east on 114 but then stopped to figure out whether we were now going to leave this storm (which was becoming quite outflowish) and head south for new storms (visible from our location) possibly developing on the triple point. While we were deciding this, the storm's RFD gust front overtook us and winds became ferocious, indeed! In fact, once we got to the intersection of Hwy 114 and Upland Road the winds began removing the roof of a church right next to us! We continued east to a parking lot, intending to get away from all power lines and trees. Winds were gusting over 70 mph. Ultimately, we followed this storm north and east of town. We transected the rear-flank core several times, each time receiving large hail (see last image above).