I took my gear to work with me anticipating a possible surprise attack late in the day. I got pretty much what I expected. Two cells went up after about an hour of cap flirting, one north of Irving (where I started from) and the other out by Ft Worth. I sat and watched both for about ten minutes, then decided I liked the FTW storm better. I plunged into what I knew would be a nightmare: DFW rush hour chasing. Miraculously I managed to avoid total gridlock, as I worked my way southwest via Irving Blvd/360/I-30/820/I-20/35W.
The cell I had targeted was propagating along a SW/NE boundary that became well-defined during the first hour of initiation. I fought heavy rain and traffic for what seemed like forever as I finally broke free south of FTW, near Crowley. The storm was still ingesting decent ESE surface flow, so I decided to stay with it, despite it's rather benign appearance. It briefly formed a lowering, as scud tags were being drawn up into the updraft as a sloooooow feeder band at around 3-5K tried to sustain inflow. It was moving into the storm base, but just barely. After a few minutes, it died. I then packed it up and moved south on 35W to Crowley proper, where I took 1187 westbound.
About five miles west of Crowley I sampled the hailcore, which greeted me with generous amounts of dimes, nickels, quarters, half-dollars, and eventually some golfballs. I thought for sure I would lose the windshield on some of the harder, larger hits, as it's still not repaired from my 5-12-05 chase
But alas, the window held, as I finally pulled over and watched something I'd never seen: significant hail falling with a fully-exposed setting sun as a backdrop...very cool indeed. After getting hammered a bit longer, I decided to move on west to my south option, in an attempt to follow the storm southwest as it continued to backbuild. Once I cleared the hail, I didn't like what I saw, so I went back east.
By this time I was hearing about the 820/10 area storm and hearing the reports of radar-indicated shear and wallclouds. I heard reports of power flashes near the same area as the WC but no one ever said "tornado." Someone came over the RACES net claiming to have video of a "rope" but I never heard an I.D. Later I heard that the still image of the supposed tornado may have been bogus. I listened for about an hour after it all went down and never heard a confirmation, though the WS seemed satisfied to say there had been one. Who knows.
All in all, a fun chase considering the crap parameters, and a very good warm-up for solo chasing, which I will be doing a lot of this year.
