04/20/05: TALK: Central/Southern/High Plains

[Jay McCoy]

Look closely at pic 685. look in front of that lowering to see the nicely shaped funnel coming down at a 45 degree angle.

You suck dude. LOL Seriously though...what time was that funnel? I am wondering if it was prior to my arrival on the storm, because I didn't get on it until about an hour after it was going. Then at one point I got held back because the hail was getting too big even for me. Nice catch though, was a decent storm!

It was a bit before 530pm if I remember correctly. There was already a tornado warning on the storm (I had called LBB reporting the rotating wall cloud earlier). This was almost due north of Turkey as we were NE of turkey looking west on hwy86 & 653 (tampico). The second one was about 2 miles east of Tampico just before 6pm but I cant confirm either touched down. They would rain wrap too fast and occlude then another wall cloud would develope south of the rain. It seemed to cycle about every 30 minutes for a good 3-4 hrs. I dont have a pic of the second but do have video so i will try and grab a still of it. Pics 686 & 687 are cool. the entire cloud was rotating as fast as a tornado. If it would have touched i would have called it a huge tornado. it is where the second funnel came out of. I will show you the video next time I see you. It is crazy.

 

[David Drummond]

Ok that makes sense. I came up from the south through Turkey and saw the first wall cloud (for me) while I was still south by Flomot. The second I saw just north of Turkey and then tried to go NE and could make out another wall which QUICKLY wrapped up and I got caught in the RFD on the back of it where I got the hail. That was about 6:45pm.

If only there were more roads in that county. I think the only county with less roads than that is out in SW TX.

 

[Tony Laubach]

What a bizzare night last night... after leaving McCook to track down the MCS in Eastern Colorado, we ran into some of the oddest weather I've ever seen. This MCS gaves us everything within a 40 mile stretch of highway from about 25 miles east of Last Chance to 15 miles west of Last Chance, all on US Hwy 36. We saw the following in about an hour time frame starting sometime close to 9pm (please remember we were on the Eastern Plains)...

Wall Cloud
Possible Funnel (scud perhaps)
Lightning, some CG
Thunder
Heavy Rain
Up to 1 inch hail
Fog
Strong Winds
Sleet
Grouple (hard snow pellets)

Yes, we ended up on the back side of this thing where temps were in the 30s and we had hard snow falling on us... the development of this system was odd as it kept spawning storms on the south end and we just passed them all along til finally it stopped.

Strange thing it was, and I'll post a log once I get my head cleared and know exactly what it is that happened to us. Many stills and a full log on there way soon!