Brett Roberts
EF5
The very strong directional shear piqued my interest yesterday and motivated me to give the Panhandle a shot, despite marginal moisture and upper-level flow. As is usually the case when I head to that area, I'm quite glad I did now.
I played a cat-and-mouse game with the Pampa-area supercell(s) for much of the late afternoon and evening. Road construction and a bridge out near Lefors made it almost impossible to get underneath the initial development near White Deer (5-5:30pm) without major detours. So after checking it out from the south, I headed back toward I-40 to hedge my bets, as several additional updrafts were looking healthy between Claude and Floydada.
It wasn't until ~6:30pm that a new updraft on the back side of the original White Deer/Pampa supercell became well-established and took a hard right, making the choice of what to pursue obvious. I blasted W out of McLean in time to watch a large, ominous wall cloud to the NW from I-40. FM-291 out of Alanreed provided the perfect intercept route, but I only made it about halfway to the updraft base before the structure op became too tempting to continue. The first photo below is the closest I got (I know that Wes L. and a couple others were closer and should have better shots of the wall cloud and funnels/possible tor), while the shots that follow are the magnificent view I enjoyed from just N of Alanreed as the sunset lighting got better and better.
This pano stitch facing E from Alanreed shows three supercells ongoing at sunset, with the Pampa-Lefors storm on the left. Distant right is the Turkey-Childress area supercell which also looked quite impressive on radar, and persisted well into the evening.
I played a cat-and-mouse game with the Pampa-area supercell(s) for much of the late afternoon and evening. Road construction and a bridge out near Lefors made it almost impossible to get underneath the initial development near White Deer (5-5:30pm) without major detours. So after checking it out from the south, I headed back toward I-40 to hedge my bets, as several additional updrafts were looking healthy between Claude and Floydada.
It wasn't until ~6:30pm that a new updraft on the back side of the original White Deer/Pampa supercell became well-established and took a hard right, making the choice of what to pursue obvious. I blasted W out of McLean in time to watch a large, ominous wall cloud to the NW from I-40. FM-291 out of Alanreed provided the perfect intercept route, but I only made it about halfway to the updraft base before the structure op became too tempting to continue. The first photo below is the closest I got (I know that Wes L. and a couple others were closer and should have better shots of the wall cloud and funnels/possible tor), while the shots that follow are the magnificent view I enjoyed from just N of Alanreed as the sunset lighting got better and better.
This pano stitch facing E from Alanreed shows three supercells ongoing at sunset, with the Pampa-Lefors storm on the left. Distant right is the Turkey-Childress area supercell which also looked quite impressive on radar, and persisted well into the evening.
