4/13/10 REPORTS: TX/NM/CO/KS/NE

[Jason Boggs]

I spent most of my energy battling winds of 40-50 mph on the way to Boise City, OK today. I hung around Boise City for a while and saw the convection initiating way to my SW. I headed down to Stratford and then eventually to Dalhart. I ate in Dalhart and then went west about 15 or 20 miles and found a spot to start taking photos of a spectacular sunset. This sunset was worth the price of admission! I haven't photographed a sunset this amazing in a very, very long time. I stuck around for a while as the storm to my SW put on a decent lightning show towards dark. It kept it's act together for a while, but eventually petered out. I traveled about 300 miles today with sunset photos to show for, but I think it was worth it. Maybe Wednesday will be a better day for storms around the area.

 

[Ryan McGinnis]

Had a spur of the moment chase today in the panhandle of Nebraska and points east. My goal was to try to get some good squall line outflow shots; unfortunately, I never came across the "gaping maw of doom" arcus clouds that I was looking for (at least they never showed up in the line segments that I was chasing), but it was a fun chase nonetheless. Got to play in the hail a bit (lots of pea sized hail with these squalls -- it covered the road on multiple occasions), got to weave in and out of the precip areas of the squalls, got to dodge tumbleweeds. Actually, on that note -- wow. A good 35mph wind from the south on the flatlands of western Nebraska is quite a sight to see. Like driving through sideways tumbleweed-rain.

There was one exciting point in the chase when I had hopes that I might get one of those streched-vorticity landspouts you see sometimes on squall lines. It happened as I crossed the boundary between the inflow and the outflow while under the roiling outflow clouds -- it went from a sustained ~40mph outflow wind from the north to a sustained ~40mph wind from the south (still cold, though) in about half a kilometer. I wish I had a vidcam running; it looked really cool coming over the crest of the hill and seeing a train of tumbleweeds crossing from north to south in the foreground with a dust storm blowing from south to north only a half mile to the east. And it was fun having the car suddenly jerk to the left as I exited the outflow.

Cant wait until May.

 

[Verne Carlson]

Looks like I was in pretty much the same locations as Ryan. Not a bad little local squall-line chase. Started up in the NE panhandle and then dropped south to Burlington as the line built south. Saw a lot of gustnado spinups, penny-hail and some intense inflow winds.

>> Full Report Here <<

 

[Wesley Luginbyhl]

It was good to finally see a supercell. We sat around in Dalhart till we were sure the storms were holding out and then blasted west to Amistad, NM and just waited for the storm to come to us. We had a decent view of the storm for about an hour, but never saw a good wall cloud or anything. There was some decent structure even though we didnt have a good view till the storm had weakened quite a bit. Definitely worth the drive as NM rarely disappoints.

 

[Ben Tillotson]

I chased in the NE panhandle as well. Very windy...

 

[Dean L. Cosgrove]

Very windswept chase

More photos and brief chase report on following page

http://chasetours.com/2010April13.htm

Dean Cosgrove

http://chasetours.com/