May 4th was a strange day. A decent threat of severe storms and low end tornado potential existed. High based storms formed off the caprock by mid afternoon and moved east. Bases never lowered. Another couple of storms, eventually supercells, formed along a boundary a bit further east southwest of Crowell, TX. Within a few minutes a lowering formed and exhibited some rotation. As the storm moved east, a line of storms formed in front of it, thus limiting the quality of inflow air into the supercell. It caused it to slowly weaken over time. The storm produced baseball sized hail, high winds and was tornado warned for a couple of hours. It showed a fantastic hook echo on radar, but it just couldn’t sustain with cold inflow from storms ahead of it.
May 4th Northwest Texas Tornadoes
One of the most exciting days of 2022 so far occurred on May 4th. A dryline/triple point was located west of Paducah, Texas as moisture streamed northward. Great shear was also present. By mid afternoon a supercell formed and quickly became severe. It would be the storm of the day and produce several tornadoes. We tried to stay in front of it, but an error in the road map wreaked havoc for us. Maps showed a paved road that would have taken us right in front of the supercell towards Crowell and eventually Lockett, however it became dirt and was blocked off by a rancher with no trespassing signs, which of course we obeyed. This made us have to back track 20 miles on muddy and wet roads through huge hail and then blast east towards Crowell where we would have gone south to get right in front of the tornadic supercell. Due to losing 40 minutes on the map error, we could not go south as the storm was already crossing the road. Instead we went east then south but by that time the 5 minute tornado was gone. We continued east and then back north at Seymour to get in front of the supercell. It was now becoming dark as lightning constantly lit up the updraft. South of Vernon we stopped to watch the storm as a truncated cone tornado formed and crossed the road in the night directly in front of us. Then numerous power flashes were observed just northwest of us and lightning lit up a wedge tornado that hit the town of Lockett. We watched as this monster EF3 tornado roared across in the darkness, only lit by lightning and power flashes. It eventually dissipated as the storm weakened. Crazy day, and one stroke of bad luck due to a error in mapping software kept us from a pretty tornado. However, we still witnessed 4 others! Enjoy the pics!
