3/17/06 Reports- Southwest Texas

[Matt Jacobs]

Nice supercell down toward Ft. Stockton this evening.

Huge wall cloud and interesting structure.

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Possible Tornado.
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[Bob Schafer]

I hung out in Marathon TX much of Friday afternoon. A small tongue of theta-e/near-60 Td's invaded that area along the Rio Grande, and Marathon was at about the zenith. There is a ridge of 6000-ish foot mountains just W of Marathon, and I anticipated orographic lifting there might be the impetus for convection. Cumulus boiled up above them all afternoon. To my north was sfc convergence as well, and the cf draped in a WNW/ESE orientation N and E/ESE of the convergence, but not too far from me that I couldn't see initiation and pursue if that convergence and bdry was successful in invoking convection. It was, and that is how Matt got those pics.

I saw it and hit the road in that direction, but only got about 5 miles out of Marathon when I got this pic:



That was in Mexico.

Knowing that the (sfc-based) storminess back up by Fort Stockton had an extremely short shelf life before its motion would have it over stable BL air, and having never seen Del Rio, I took off for Del Rio. I still had two problems at that point. Well, three. The BL conditions at DRT weren't great, either, there wasn't really any upper support over there, and the storm was a long way from DRT. By the time I got to DRT, it was dark, the storm was still well into Mexico, and radar presentation made it quite obvious that it had weakened anyway.

Being Spring Break time, I guess, DRT was packed! I couldn't find a motel room, so hit the road for SJT and got a bit of a head start on yesterday's target.

Well, it was pretty cool to get a pic of a storm in Mexico!

Bob