Saw I believe 3 seperate
tornadoes and probably 4-5 individual supercells. We had targeted
West of Plainview, Tx but after looking at model data (namely the
RUC) and other info we decided to head further north to near the
Oklahoma/Texas/New Mexico border. On the way up there we started
seeing some turkey towers and that built over the next hour or so
into some weak storms.
We decided not to pursue them
into Kansas/Colorado and we decided to head back down a bit to
the south. At this point things were not looking good but soon
storms started developing to our south and the fun began. We went
through several weak LP ish (if that) storms but we continued
south towards several much stronger storms that were developing
West of Amarillo and moving NNE towards us and some nice
crespucular rays appeared.
One of the stronger cells had a
horizontal funnel tube snaking out the back.
We continued south until we got
to Channing, Tx and from there we headed a few miles east and
waited for the storms to come by. After a bit we noticed a wall
cloud appearing out of rain to our southwest and soon we were
able to discern some nice upward motion as well as rotation and
occasional funnels.
We were dealing with another
storm to our south that was starting to drop hail on us but we
stuck with the wall cloud as the motions were very encouraging
and soon a funnel cloud dipped down and very quickly was on the
ground.
The tornado did a rapid
tranformation from a slender elephent trunk to a much larger
multi-vortex cone.
When the tornado was just to our
NNW the RFD came kicking around and blocked our view so we headed
further east. We had glimpses occasionally of what appeared to be
a very large wedge tornado. It was hard to see due to extreme
lack of contrast. We did manage to get a picture (although it had
to be enhanced).
We lost the wedge after a while
and we continued on to the east and then north where we came
across a stovepipe and then a slender rope tornado (which after
reading other chase reports and looking at radar this is a second
and different tornado).
We saw another tornado on
another supercell further south and after that we intercepted I
think 2 more individual supercells. Some day! Here are pictures
from the 3rd (i think) tornado and some structures shots of the
last two supercells we chased.
