2015-05-05 REPORTS: TX

[Bob Schafer]

I chased the tornado just north of Big Spring. Boy, there were sure some flooded roads in that area! As I was headed S on 87 from Lamesa there were several sections of the northbound lanes that were under more than a foot of water (from last night). There were some emergency people around, but I don't know if they were escorting anyone going northbound through the southbound lanes (that were passable, but just barely in some spots) or not. I didn't witness them doing so. There was even one abandoned car sitting in the median with the water up to its windshield.

Just north of Big Spring I turned east on FM846, which is paved and was paralleling the storm very nicely! Here are a couple crappy vidcaps. It's all I have:



The tornado was going up and down practically like a yoyo. The first image is from 2030Z, second from 2035Z, and I filmed it until about 2040Z.



It was really a beautiful storm, and the rotation was quite intense. When I reached "Vincent" just before Hwy350 I made the mistake of going north. Oops. About 10 miles later, here is my road:



Yes, that's the road! I had to turn around and go all the way back to where I started.

 

[Jeff Duda]

STAFF NOTE: Since we had two threads for today pop up at almost the same time and for areas largely separated in space, we will go with two different threads for the day, one for the upper Midwest and one for the southern Plains. Please place reports accordingly.

 

[Todd Lemery]

We were on HWY 40 west of Lubbock. Had one tube drop down and around the time that that one was roping out, had another drop down. The picture is from My IPhone. Long story, but my chase partner's pics were all wrecked by the flash being on and the pics I took with my real camera weren't taken at a photogenic time. The hail was from the same storm

 

[Marcus Diaz]

I'll post my video later. I left AMA at 3pm, hoping I could get south of Lubbock in time to see some great storms. Unfortunately, as soon as I left, the tornado in Big Spring was already in progress. I was hoping for some redevelopment later in the afternoon. I got to Lubbock, and was not happy with the radar. It was 4:30 and all I had was a few small storms to the south and a line approaching from the west. We drove south to Wilson to watch this updraft struggle to stay alive.

After entertaining ourselves with the line of crap coming into Lubbock, we decided to keep pacing east. That struggling updraft turned into this mess of towers.

At this point I'm so done with the day. It didn't look like anything was going to happen. We kept going east hoping for some shelf cloud structure or something. But then I noticed our mess of towers was now dropping a ton of precip. 2 scans of radar that I didn't have previously showed this storm grew substantially. We kept pace to the east and stopped to observe some rotation to our south. Sure enough, the first tornado came down and lasted a good 5-8 minutes. As it roped out, it was a quick handoff to the new tornado, which is pictured.

Although being north meant we're looking through rain to see it, we were in a rather clear portion of the storm. Going east, we punched through the core and met up with some baseball sized hail. Windshield was busted, but we kept going ahead of it and let it pass to our north. We stuck around to get some great shots of the sunset and mammatus. Called it a day and headed home. Really good outcome on a day I wasn't highly confident on.

More pics of this chase can be seen HERE.

 

[Marcus Diaz]

Here's the full video from the day. Shows the early rotation, developing tornado, the handoff between #1 and #2, and then me losing my windshield at the end.

 

[Bob Schafer]

 

[Cammie Czuchnicki]

A little delayed in getting this up but me and my fianceTim are out here from the UK for our 6th year chasing. We managed to intercept this cell north of Big Spring too. We watched the cell developing on radar as we drove south through Snyder and then toward Big Spring. I recall there being 2 cells that had popped up and we managed to avoid the hail core of the first to get to the second which was much larger and clearly rotating. With the car we have, we have to stick to just the paved roads but even so our viewpoint was fantastic and I remember photographing the tornado whilst also getting sunburnt! Here are a few shots of the tornado in it's different stages. Best day in 6 years so far!