2019-03-22 REPORTS: NM/TX/OK

[John Farley]

Wasn't sure whether to put this here or in the winter section, but since this thread is already going, NM is in the thread, and it involves both severe and winter wx, I will go ahead and post it here. In addition to the severe in the TX Panhandle, this storm also produced interesting events in the cold core portion in north-central NM and in Colorado, including a funnel cloud in Cortez, CO where the high temperature was 45. While skiing at Ski Santa Fe, I encountered this moving in a little before 11 a.m.:



When this arrived about 15 minutes later, it produced a heavy burst of graupel/snow pellets that gradually transitioned to ordinary snow. It was moving pretty fast and didn't last long, but still produced up to an inch of graupel and snow at the ski area in about 20 minutes. Then the sun was back out, followed around 1:30 by thundersnow. This time it was almost all ordinary snow, not graupel, with about a half-dozen low, long rumbles of thunder. What I learned later about this was the most interesting part - at the same time the ski area was getting snow, the storm was producing 1-inch hail around Glorieta Pass, to the southeast of the ski area. So thundersnow and severe hail in the same storm! Here is a radar image, annotated to indicate where the hail and snow were occurring:



I wrote up a more detailed report for my web page, which you can access at:

http://www.johnefarley.com/wx32219.htm

 

[Dan Robinson]

I started the day in Shamrock, making my way west toward clearing skies. A warm front/differential heating boundary was draped north of I-40 southeast through Amarillo, so the plan was to catch storms as they interacted with it. The main problem with the area northwest of AMA is that there is a massive area with no roads essentially north of I-40 from the New Mexico border to Highway 385. I had a choice to either intercept on the south side of this or the north. I chose the former.

The first storm organized as it approached Adrian. There is a gravel road that extends a couple of miles north into the "no man's land" before it dead-ends at a private ranch. I was able to follow the storm to this point, but it passed about 5 miles north of the end of the road. From this location I watched the storm's base lower with RFD carving a nice clear slot. Rotation at the apex of the RFD was strong, and a few weakly-rotating funnels descended periodically.



I dropped back to I-40 for the next storm, a QLCS structure that developed a strong kink/circulation moving over Vega. I saw a well-defined funnel buried in the rain on the east side of Vega that more than likely was tornadic (not counting it until something is confirmed).



After this storm moved north of the interstate, I went east to Bushland for the next cell which developed more classic supercell structure, though very high based and with little in the way of visible rotation. I stayed ahead of this storm as it moved through Amarillo, allowing it to pass over me north of town. Hail covered the road a couple of inches deep.

With everything mostly congealed into a long QLCS line, I let the storms pass to the east, expecting some dramatic light from the setting sun as well as possibly a couple of upward lightning flashes to the towers on the north side of Amarillo. Both didn't disappoint. A vivid double rainbow appeared for 15 minutes, followed by three quality upward lightning discharges after sunset.



I drove east behind the storms to my hotel in Weatherford, OK. There were stretches of I-40 that had two or three inches of hail covering it, slowing traffic to a crawl.

This Youtube video includes some of the shots from this day, most notably the upward lightning flashes captured at 1,500 frames per second: