April 22nd wasn’t exactly the most exciting chase of my life, but I didn’t expect to see truly spectacular storms either. I decided to chase because it was during my 3-day weekend, and the setup appeared marginally favorable for sustained supercell thunderstorms rolling off the high terrain of eastern New Mexico into moist, unstable air in West Texas. I departed Dodge City around 8:30am or so for a target around Clovis. I was banking on initiation of storms near the Tucumcari-Clovis areas or the far southwestern Texas Panhandle by late afternoon. I arrived in Clovis around mid-afternoon only to find south-southwesterly winds at the surface and dewpoints in the 30s. Convergence was weak at best in this area and the flow certainly wasn’t of upslope component — which was rather frustrating. I had to make a decision at this point whether to completely call this chase a bust and head back home empty-handed… or continue on to the south where there was much better low level forcing in southeastern New Mexico to the northeast of Roswell.
In Portales, a quick check of the radar and satellite clued me into convective development initiating off the Sacramento Mts west of Roswell-Artesia. As the storms developed eastward towards a Hobbs-Tatum line, I vectored myself towards the Tatum area where the closest, strongest cell on radar was of easiest intercept.
At Tatum, I re-fueled and checked radar, noticing the best storm on radar was now about 30 miles or so to my west-southwest. I drove west on some ranch roads to a stopping location about 20 miles west-southwest of Tatum. I sat at this location watching this weak storm slowly drift east towards me. The storm remained below severe levels and the structure was not exactly that picturesque. The high-based storm did offer an opportunity to photograph some cloud-to-ground lightning. This was my first crack at daytime lightning with my Nikon D70 DSLR using a 3-stop ND filter and a circular polarizer to block a total of about 4-stops of light allowing me to leave the shutter open as long as 1 or 2 seconds. I managed to capture these two (1 2) shots with a windmill in the shot. After about 20 minutes or so, high level mammatus-type cloud structure was streaming over my location beneath the anvil canopy.
I continued north to Hwy 380 as a new small storm was developing to my west. When I got to 380, I stopped for about 5-7 minutes to try and photograph more CGs to the immediate west. I did manage to get this one captured in this 5-7 minute window before the rain started and the storm got too close. I reached Tatum again and headed north from there on Hwy 206 to Crossroads. The storms developed and weakened in a pulse-like fashion in this area, but as each new storm went up, it appeared to be a little more organized than the preceding one. I followed state Hwy 506 to the TX state line, stopping every few miles along the way to photograph lightning from inside the car using my suction cup mount. I did get out for a brief moment to get a few structure shots looking west and northwest. At sunset, the sky became increasingly orange and violet in hue towards the horizon, which was rather photogenic.
Here are a few of the CG shots I managed to get looking north to northeast from near the TX-NM state line southwest of Bledsoe: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4. Of course, it was darker by this time, so it was easier to capture CGs with longer shutter speeds of around 8s each or so. This particular storm producing the CGs near Bledsoe was moving off to the northeast away from me, and with nothing much else near-by, I decided to begin my ~6hr trek towards home. I took state Hwy 214 north from Morton to Needmore where I had to follow a detour west a few miles. It was after 10pm at this point, and I noticed a couple new storms going up to my west as evident by increased lightning activity. Heading west on this detour route west of Needmore, some of the lightning was of the “staccato” CG type…with strikes about one per minute or so. I finally hit the north-leg of this detour a few miles ahead and pulled off to setup the tripod. There was essentally no ambient light from city lights or anything, so I could keep the shutter open as long as I wanted to on “bulb” setting to see if I could get anything. After about 10 minutes of sitting there, and missing a number of the stacatto bolts, I finally got one on the left side of my frame. I knew I had a couple of trees in the foreground of this shot that I had as landmarks for my composition, but it wasn’t until I got home from my chase in the morning when I realized I happened to get this particular lightning strike dead-center immediately behind one of the trees. The storm moved slowly east just north of me and I got one more decent lightning photograph before I left. The staccato lightning shot was the one shot that made the 800-mile round trip worth it!
I didn’t get home until shortly after 7am, having to stop every couple hours or so for catnaps, since I was chasing solo. It was a fun chase, and good to get out of town for a day, despite not seeing a supercell storm.
http://www.underthemeso.com/gallery2/stormchase/chase06/2006apr22/
Mike Umscheid