EDIT: I just updated my website with a few pictures from April 1st and 6th. No big deal - no giant
tornadoes but a shot of hail and a couple of somewhat interesting storm shots.
Hopefully this crazy year will pull a bit back into the southern plains and give me a shot of
chasing in Tx or outside of the hills and trees.
http://www.tornadoxtreme.com/2006_Chases/A.../april_1-6.html
Original Post Follows:
Headed out with Gene Moore early Saturday with initial target Childress to set up and monitor initiation. We made good time. There in Childress we hooked up with Bill Combes and David Douglas and stopped and grabbed some food. I had the pleasure of finally meeting Tim Marshall, and his friend Sean. I was expecting initiation near 21z and somewhere around that time convection started to our southwest on cue. At this point I'd like to say that pretty much all model products (least that I had looked at) had indicated favorable potential for not only supercells but also tornadoes during the day along the dryline. To keep it short, lets just say that all ingredients appeared to be there on the model products as well as in much of the live data. Note before leaving Childress we had many readings of -13 to -10 lifted indices south of our area per Goes quantitative satellite. We left Childress with Bill and David in tow after providing them with a radio for communications with us. Anyway we shot southwest and intercepted the first building cell on southwest side near Tell. As we approached the lowered base / wallcloud and town we passed some chasers along the way including Jeff Piotrowsky on the side of the road. The setup looked ideal, and we were expecting quick intensification and a tornado to form soon.
Basically that never happened. The cell just started raining and outflowing on the southern end with a bit of lightning in the precip as well were underneath it. We managed to work our way a bit further to the southwest of Tell Here my inverter started going on the blink, but with a little effort managed to get it back on line. However I made a note to replace it and get a better one - which I did yesterday.
We followed this HP blob to the east as it worked it's way up toward Childress and Paducah. From Paducah I believe we went north where there was an intense precipitation core in progress that was very dark and appeared to have some decent wind in it as well. I thought perhaps it was some type of microburst. We waited for that to pass and drove on up into it as it was trailing away where we found some good hail all over the place. Largest stones that we measured were 3" and we took some photos of us holding them. Another cell was coming up to merge from the southwest and it appeared some area to our east had some potential as Threatnet was also showing shear increasing in that area. We thought the merger might be favorable so we cut back south and from Paducah took a road to the northeast that went through Swearingen and on to Quanah. In this area we just drove on into the cores and precipitation was all around with light hail and flooding along the roads, fields, and especially ditches on sides of road. At one point it appeared that Threatnet was all messed up didn't match reality, but it was confusing. We decided to ignore Threatnet and go on what our eyes were telling us as Threatnet also showing rotation directly ahead toward Quanah as it was getting dark. Basically nada. Cut on over to Vernon and stopped at Brahms to eat, and then the long drive home as 1 tornado warning was finally occurring in KS.
So, April Fools I suppose - we got suckered. Not really a bust cause we got the fun of the chase, tested the equipment, met some good people, had good food, and even got 3" hail, but still no tornado - which of course is my main end goal when I go out. I enjoyed it but would have enjoyed it better with some big tubes, and let me just say that I though Saturday appeared to have the potential that apparently Sunday ended up having. Even SPC got suckered, so we were in good company. It was amazing to see all the parameters and indices just somehow miss it.
I think a good post analysis of why there was no tornadic on Saturday is in order. We did note that west of Vernon looking up at the towers they didn't appear to be sheared, and they also didn't appear to be rock hard. Perhaps it was lack of cyclonic curvature on the short wave, perhaps earlier storms had stabilized the area a bit? Perhaps the wave was really late (don't think so). I believe that somehow the storms weren't able to utilize a boundary to increase their effective SRH and go tornadic. That's all I can figure. Other thoughts are welcome.
