Real brief for now. I intercepted 3 supercells on Friday, May 1st. The first supercell was the mid-late afternoon supercell which formed in Southwestern Knox County to the west of Knox City. I observed a several-minute tornado west of O’Brien as the storm was organizing into a supercell. This occurred around 3:40pm CDT. This storm went on to become largely outflow dominant given its high-based characteristics. Another marginal tornado probably occurred northwest of Stamford later in the storm’s life. It kicked up some amazing red dirt which I got good images of. The storm then died, and instead of joining the hordes to go after the Seymour storm, I loitered around northeastern Jones County. This paid off. I intercepted another photogenic supercell toward sunset near Roby. A third, even more impressive supercell formed after sunset with it becoming dark… in western Haskell County. This storm dropped south-southeast toward Anson and eventually southeastern Jones County northeast of Abilene. The lightning was prolific with this storm… rather amazing. This was a very satisfying chase. The two images below are of the tornado at the beginning of the chase. The 2nd image is a severely contrast-enhanced version of the first, revealing the faint dust column that my Nikon camera picked up on (which I didn’t realize at the time). Timestamp on the image below is 3:41pm CDT. This is looking almost due west from an observing location ~ 2 miles west of O’Brien, TX:
Congrats, Mike! You called it…as Roach says, “Big CAPE kicks big ass!” Wish I could have been there (mid shifts…you know how THAT goes).
Your youthful eyesight must be fading away already. Even I could see the faint, translucent dust tube in the unenhanced photo, before looking at the enhanced version. Was it really hard to see with your eyeballs?
Comment by ===== Roger ===== — May 2, 2009 @ 4:54 am
Actually, there were a couple moments where a concentrated debris cloud formed at ground level, but I didn’t get any images of the more obvious debris cloud as I was trying to get my spotternetwork reporting thing to work… I was in shitty cell data coverage at the time, so I had to call Matt Crowther and relay to him what I saw.
Comment by Mike U — May 2, 2009 @ 6:44 am
Looks like a definite, violent wedge tornado! Good call on the forecast. Where were you for the tornado report near Rule?
Rich
Comment by Rich Thompson — May 2, 2009 @ 9:14 am
Mike,
Thanks for verifying this as a tornado. You managed to get there a few minutes before Bill Reid and I did, and so you had a better view than we did.
-Bob
Comment by Bob Conzemius — May 10, 2009 @ 10:04 pm