:roll:
Phil and I met up with the large group of folks at the Kettle restaurant (or whatever it was) there in Childress by mid-afternoon. The majority of them headed south towards a storm ne of Lubbock, while Phil and I hung around CDS a bit longer to see if storms west of Childress would intensify. Given the better shear progged to the north, we didn't want to go too far south. This was a very bad decision.
We headed south out of CDS towards a supercell near Dickons. We successfully navigated side roads with a large wallcloud to our west. After a pretty good RFD occlussion, we witnessed a small, short-lived tornado east of Dickons (west of Guthrie). The tornado was a dust spin-up column, though it was definately a tornado (nice column rising towards a funnel aloft). I had been worried about the southern storms since there was all sorts of precip in this northern storm's inflow area to the east. Despite repeated RFD occlussions and very nice wallclouds, we opted to jump ship and head for the southern storm. No radar data available at this time, so we were going solely off experience. Many minutes after we left the northern storm, it began to completely fall apart, so we felt we made the correct decision.
Finally, we got a radar image in Guthrie, and it was showing two 60-75 VIL cores south-southwest of us, likely impacting Aspermont in a short time. We made the decision to haul south afas and try to beat it across Hwy 83. We made it through Aspermont without any problem, and heard of a tornado warning for the storm north of Rotan. When we finally got view of the base, we noticed a very large wall-cloud with this storm. However, there was a lot of precip in the RFD, and there was also a huge amount of precip to the southwest of the RFD (almost as if there was another small cell hugging the southwest side of the storm). We watched this wallcloud persist and eventually weaken near Hamlin. Eventually, the storm went to garbage, and we met up with a slew of other OU chasers at the Stamford Pizza Hut.
Knowing that we broke off from the group that would later go on to bag the slew of tornadoes in Kent county is very frustating to say the least. I knew low-level flow was better to the north, so we were trying to keep our north option open for as long as possible. Unfortunately, w/o radar help, it wasn't easy to see which storm was better until we started hearing tornado reports for the southern storm. NOAA radio coverage was pitiful in the Guthrie/Dickens areas, so we had no idea the southern storm was going bonkers. While we did see a brief tornado, it's very disappointing to know that, after a 700-mile trip (not complaining there, as I know a lot of folks travelled a lot longer), we missed the tornado machine by 1 county.
I guess at least this chase holds in fashion with the way the rest of 2005 has gone. We got two small tornadoes in Paris TX on the first chase of the year, and one small tornado in TX on the last chase of the year (well, spring season at least). Between the two, every chase was filled with frustration and disappointment. The two days I sat out on (Thurs and Sat) turned out to be very productive for those who did chase. Grrrr.
EDIT: I like Aaron's 50/50 comment above LOL. Perhaps I should take my gut feeling, ignore it, and just figure out where Eric N., Amos, David D., and JR are going, since they always seem to be on the right storm. In what many would call a bad year, these folks have consistently landed the prize supercells and tornadoes... I don't think this season could have gone much worse for me.
. We saw the awesome truncated/stovepipe tornado near Jayton. Nice pics and video as well. We may have also witnessed a distant tornado well to the West of Hamlin. The Hamlin wallcloud had awesome Movement and some of these cells showed 138 mph shear on Baron Mobile threat net XM WXWORX.
