West Texas Tornadoes

Chase Recap:

Forecast

David and I were out late on the 28th in New Mexico, arriving back to his house well after midnight. So we started the day off late on the 29th at David’s house near Lubbock with a hand analysis. This was my first real chance at seeing a hand analysis done in person. Plenty of boundaries showed up across West Texas. Our original target was Plainview, Texas.

David and I took our time to get going, and then headed up towards our target. Storms started initiating on our drive up, and we intercepted the cell as it was still building, and had 2 rain cores.

The storm moved eastward, and David and I met up with Graham just northwest of Plainview. David did a quick phoner for the 5pm newscast on KCBD before we crossed I-27. The storm started getting it’s act together, then started outflowing. A ton of dust got stirred up over Plainview, which made for some good video. Then some gustnado looking things spun up, but I’m pretty sure they were actually tornadic. The dust swirl underneath a rotating wall cloud had multi-vortices before dissipating.

We moved east a bit, and caught another dust swirl under a rotating wall cloud. I reported that as a Tornado in NWSChat. We also got a few 1″ pieces of hail which we measured and reported.

We then got further south and as we were turning onto Ranch Road 97, another chaser pointed behind us. We looked to see tornado #3 roping out. We continued a bit east towards the main area of rotation before stopping. We were stopped maybe a minute before tornado #4 touched down. This one turned into a large cone tornado. David and I decided to punch east, and get in front of it, narrowly missing being runover by it. The rest of the experience can only best be described with video below.

After the tornadoes, we all ended up on dirt roads. Reed and his crew appeared to be getting stuck, and so were we. A pickup truck with Michigan plates and rear wheel drive got stuck as well. David took over driving (I had been driving previously) and we started heading back west to get out of the muddy roads. Graham managed to get stuck as well with his 4 wheel drive Tahoe.

We ran into Tony Laubach and the Discovery crew with him before going further west. I had to get out and push David through the mud, and then he kept going while I ran behind the van getting soaked. It must have been a pretty funny sight.

We had to stop and break my old tripod and use the legs to get the mud out of the wheel wells since the rear tires stopped moving. I started dumping video after this and we went to the KCDB station to edit video and David did an interview for the camera.