Jay, Rob, Mitch, Jon, and I left Dodge City around 1:30pm and headed west to Lamar, CO. We were undecided as to whether to play the Palmer Divide or the Raton Mesa as both looked pretty good for a supercell thunderstorm. When we approached Lamar, a check of the latest data revealed that the Raton Mesa area to our south had higher CAPE air (more instability). Both areas had about the same shear. At Lamar, we headed south towards Springfield, CO as storms were beginning to form south of Kim, Colorado on the mesas along the NM-CO state line.
We decided to intercept this storm west of Campo. We headed west about 15 miles and approached the updraft of this storm to out west-southwest. There, we met up with Al Pietrycha and Dave Floyd from Goodland. Dave had some bad luck blowing not one, but two tires on this road we were on. After helping Dave out getting back on the road, we backtracked to the east towards Campo. Along the drive back to Campo, our storm was becoming better organized, with a decent wall cloud to our southwest.
It didn’t take long for this storm to become outflow dominant. Soon, more storms were forming to our immediate southeast through southwest. With timely radar updates on the road, we decided to core punch this mess to get on the south side. We finally made it to the other side just north of Boise City. (on the radar images, the circled dot indicates our GPS location)
Our storms were organizing into a linear system with a well-structured shelf cloud. We found a spot to photograph the shelf cloud about 3 miles south of Keyes at the intersection of Hwy 171 and 64. (radar below at the time of the photograph)
We then continued south to intercept the tail-end storm of this line which revealed some supercellular characteristics, but the storm fought a losing battle with cool outflow from the storms to the immediate north.
We ended the chase near Dalhart and headed to Clayton for the night. All in all, another pretty good storm photography day, so I’m happy.
