Pleasant Supercell near Goodland…
…Goodland Texas, That Is!
1 Jun 2007
SHORT: SE-moving supercell eastern NM into TX South Plains after bull snake adventure.
LONG: Elke and I puttered around the central Panhandle for part of the day trying to figure out what to do with a dizzying array of low level boundaries and possible convective initiation areas. Somewhere on the E side of Amarillo, we resoundingly rejected stern-chasing that early, horrendously messy, gigantic HP monstrosity near Childress as a viable option. So we wandered southward toward Lubbock (LBB) — and the most prominent boundary — while the atmosphere sorted itself out.
Tag-teaming with the crew of Jersey-Smackmaster Fogel, his huge dog “Thunder” and his old human friend Roman (Two Dudes and a Dog, Edition 2007-A), we slithered about the flatlands like that big fat bull snake I accidentally ran over near Tulia. Somehow I didn’t kill or even appear to injure it. We poked the rotund reptile with a stick for awhile, making it an intensely ill-tempered varmint. Finally, the snake made a beeline straight for the undercarriage of DF’s rental vehicle and crawled up into the catacombs of linkages, nooks and crannies. We never saw the hissing serpent again…for all we know it’s still coiled up somewhere under there!
Finally I decided we should head W toward towers that were going up near the W edge of the outflow boundary (OFB), NW of Clovis (CVS). Although the mid-upper level winds weren’t ideal, the moist axis, stronger upstream E-SSE flow vectors and mentally-drawn streamline axis went straight into that area, implying a convergence max; and the backed (easterly) winds we were feeling along the OFB implied enlarged hodographs. So maybe something could rotate for a little while and put on a structure show before retching a load of outflow.
W of CVS near Cannon AFB, we found a baby mammatus field nestled amongst multiple updraft regions and cores, the most intense of which became the southern storm, to our W. Doesn’t look like much yet, right? Hey, it was New Mexico, and the storms would get more interesting.
Our storm turned hard right and was looking promising on DF’s Mobile NetThreat software and GRLevelX display. We spent the next couple hours staying just ahead of the storm as it churned SEward over Portales, catching up to Brian Curran and Ed Calianese between Rogers and Causey NM.
A couple of times this storm developed a wall cloud and a small occlusion clear slot, the most promising of which slowly rotated NW-W of Portales. But it was high based the whole time, and didn’t seem to have time to tighten a good cloud-base circulation before being undercut by shots of its own outflow.
This is when we blasted straight to Goodland TX. Somewhere near there we stopped to look at the storm and chat, and BC and DF decided to discuss the intricacies of the interrelationships between food and flatulence. Unlike them, I believe in action more than talk, so I silently strolled over there just upwind from them and…well, suffice to say DF soon was gagging and BC ran like hell back to his vehicle.
To escape the storm’s low theta-e rear flank outflow and a human form of high theta-e rear flank outflow, we hauled SE through Morton. During those few occasions when we got far enough E to see it, the storm structure was beautiful, with bands, tiers, and at one point between Morton and Whiteface, intersecting visual lines of a distinctly architectural flavor. Meanwhile, other storms that had formed in the central Panhandle were backbuilding and merging into the NE side of ours to form an MCS.
Along the leading edge of the outflow appeared a non-rotating, false-tornado dust column to our N (actual and enhanced photos), a feature that more careless or excitable observers might claim in undue haste to be a “gust front tornado”.
Wanting to beat the storm to our supper destination, we finally called it a day and headed into LBB for a fine steak dinner to celebrate the previous day’s tornado near Guymon.
BTW… Looking off to the distant SE, after we dropped S from CVS through Portales, we had a great view of the mid-upper levels of the Martin County storm, and I did take a few stills. It had multiple vertical walls, deep convective “fist of god” pulses with corresponding overshoots, and shortly before sunset, a pretty little “rings of Saturn” formation of concentric anvil layers off the W side of the updraft wall. I was driving through most of the “Saturn” stage, but maybe bc or EdC got some shots then.
All in all, another fun and worthwhile chase day out on the Llano Estacado…