A Long Drive Pays Off (Part 4 of 4)

In a perfect world of storm chasing, the entire day would be spent focusing on the day's events to come.  Early mornings would be spent pouring over model data and narrowing down a general target area. Late morning/early afternoons would be spent driving to the target area and refining a narrow area to wait.  Late afternoons would be spent at the target area waiting for storms to initiate.

I do not live in this world.

My hierarchy to see if storm chasing is going to happen seems to follow a very logical - almost programmatic - flow which goes something like this: 

IF storms are expected to arrive on Saturday or Sunday
AND IF storms are forecast to be within a county or two
AND IF the kids are cooperating
AND IF they have something to do in the car
AND IF there are no other obligations
THEN perhaps, maybe possibly we'll see about going storm chasing. 

In other words far, far from perfect.

Therefore, looking at the SPC outlooks throughout the day on Saturday, May 16, it looked like a great for storm chasing - just not near me.  Sure, we were in the slight risk category, but the action area looked to be well to our northwest.

As I write this I can't even think of what we did after church that day, so I'm assuming it was anything but spectacular.  Regardless, much like the previous week, we make a last-minute decision to drive northwest towards the Wichita Falls area.  I'm really not exaggerating when I say 'last minute' either.  We ended up leaving the house about 4:30PM.  If you figure a 2 1/2 hour drive, sure that would get us somewhere into the enhanced risk area, but being so late in the day, we'd need to have some pretty good luck to see anything before dark.  The drive out there was pretty uneventful.  The kids, mesmerized by their Leapster games, seemed not to notice the long drive out there - which was certainly a benefit.  As we got closer, the once distant clouds began to grow taller and obscure the blue sky.  It was almost go time.

At 6:50 PM, the first tornado warning of the area was issued for a storm located northwest of Wichita Falls, TX.  The problem was that we were still nearly a half hour away in the next county!

This storm looked awesome on radar, but I knew that due to the late hour, we'd only have time to pick a single target and stick with it before we lost daylight.  Yes, the storm was heading northeast, but could we make it through Wichita Falls in time to catch up to it?  I had my doubts. 

By the time we made it to the outskirts of Wichita Falls it was 7:10 PM and my hopes were dwindling even further.  However, it was also at that time when another storm - to the southwest - became tornado warned!  YES!! This was the new target storm!!

We jumped on US-82 to head southwest toward the storm.  By 7:30 PM, we had made it as far as Holiday, TX - which was inside the warned area.  We continued our way along some back roads trying to catch up with the storm..  Much to my surprise, we still had daylight left!

 
10 minutes later, we pull off the road to admire this astonishing sight....

WOWSA!  Seeing this made the entire trip totally worth it!!  The structure on this storm was simply incredible.  The striations of the mesocyclone were clearly visible - indicating that this storm was indeed rotating.  Looking to the right of the storm I noticed something that I hadn't seen before in person - an inflow band, also known as a beaver's tail.

This section of the storm is the boundary between the warmer air flowing into the storm (inflow) with the rain-cooled air (outflow) rushing out of the storm.

We continued to follow this beauty for the next 20 minutes but with it being so late in the day, the lack of light soon prevented my iPhone camera from doing any more good. We officially broke off the chase and headed back towards Wichita Falls to grab a late dinner.

The long drive home gave me plenty of time to reflect on the amazing sights I had seen that evening as well as come to the realization that the spring chase season was probably coming to an abrupt halt.  The long, hot days of summer were soon going to eclipse the exceptionally wet and active spring we had.  All in all, Spring 2015 was fantastic and I can't wait for more chases ahead.

-Andrew