5/14/2010 – West Texas Supercells and Funnel

A rather amazing moisture surge (by west Texas standards) occurred overnight on Thursday, which set up a pretty obvious play for the I-10 to I-20 corridor between Odessa and Ft. Stockton. Unfortunately, we missed the initial tornado near Kermit due to the very early show – storms formed near Monahans around lunchtime. Heck, at that time, we were restocking the cooler with deli stuff in Ft. Stockton. We raced north up to the western Odessa area were we intercepted the supercell as it wrapped up and produced a funnel that streched about 2/3rds of the way to the ground. This storm quickly crossed the east-west oriented boundary and became elevated. Storms continued to form back to the southwest along the boundary, and we played these all the way down to the Crane area. The storms along this axis were all outflow dominant, which made for some fun in situ observations of gustnadoes. We witnessed a large fire and smoke plume emanated from what appeared to be a lightning-struck oil well west of Crane, which was perhaps the highlight of the mid afternoon. The storms pressed southeast and we followed the high-based storms to McCamey, Iraan, and west of Ozona along I-10, where we rode out the hail core under an overpass. The storm during the late evening light was spectacular. Overall, a pleasing chase despite the early misses.

Funnel near West Odessa area.

One of the many outflow, shear-induced gustnadoes east of Crane. These were close to touching the cloud base and, therefore, meeting the definition of a tornado.

Lonely road near Iraan, TX.

Hail core approaching us along I-10.

Gif animation of stills ... near Iraan, TX.

Gif animation of stills ... rural I-10, west of Ozona, TX.

Time-lapse of the day's activities.