Day 7: A Long-Awaited Tornado

Woke up at 7 and packed up. Met Lloyd for breakfast and talked politics with the owner of the hotel. I got my gear and stood by the van watching low level clouds stream northwestwards. Roger and Alister came down for breakfast and then we all met at 9. We left to fill the tires on the van and get snacks. We drove southwest towards La Mesa. There was a monster supercell munching its way across the countryside, formed on a kink in the warm front. It died before we got there, but fresh supercells were forming. We stopped in Snyder for lunch and then got right on a supercell. We drove north and punched through the RFD core, with decent hail and got violent motion in the bear cage. It didn't produce, but did come quite close. We drove south again into Snyder and headed west towards Patricia.

We intercepted the storm of the day just outside Patricia and it did magical things. It cycled and cycled, producing gustnadoes galore, big blocky wall clouds with tremendous motion, hail and very strong inflow winds. Roger was concerned that it was north of the boundary and couldn't warp the boundary up into itself, but it was sucking in cold air.

We got one strong RFD hook that occluded with rain, and we drove south. Suddenly Roger screamed "There's a tornado!" The rain curtain parted to reveal a gorgeous tapered cone tornado, which morphed into a stovepipe a few miles to our west. We watched it for a few minutes until we were in danger of getting munched by the forward flank core, so we went south. The tornado roped out, a very pretty sight. We continued to chase it as it cycled again and again, and it did come quite close to dropping another a few times, but it just didn't get it done.

We decided to blow off the storm in favor of the stronger one to the west. It had a wicked hook on it. It didn't take long to get there, and it looked good. This storm presented incredible structure with crazy inflow and a 50-mile long laminar beavertail. It also cycled, spinning like mad. We got an enormous gustnado next to us. We had to blow off the storm to get gas 20 miles south of the storm. The overall storm structure was magnificent. As we were gassing up Roger said that a tornado was being reported on our storm, so we jumped back into the van and raced back north. It wasn't doing anything, though the beavertail was amazing. After watching it cycle once more, we blew it off and headed northwest to Gail to intercept a little high-based LP supercell. When we got there it had collapsed, though we did get some hail out of it. We stopped in Post to get a McDinner, then north. We have hours to go yet to get to Liberal, KS. Tomorrow looks scary.