5/7-8/2009 - Texas-sized Monkey Love

Well, my 2009 storm chasing begins ... with an initial dud and lack of good prospects on the horizon. This weather pattern is very unusual for May -- featuring dismal zonal flow with a lack of good upper-level troughs to focus targets. In fact, this pattern is something one would expect in July or August, not May. Hence, the number of summer-like progressive derechos (as opposed to supercell tornadoes) that have traversed the central and eastern U.S. the past couple days.

Anyway, on the 7th, I flew from Chicago, IL to Jackson, MS to meet up with the usual suspects for my first trek into the Plains for the May-June chase season.

Beautiful cu field across Tennessee.

My first tornado of the trip ... well, a horizontal vortex generated by the plane flaps counts, right? Hell, it looks a lot more tornado-like than some of the crap that passes off as "tornadoes" on some chaser message boards these days.

Unfortunately, our rental minivan from Hertz was not available upon arrival, despite the reservation we'd had for a good two months. It was very Seinfeld-esque in that a car rental company can apparently take a reservation, but can't apparently hold the reservation. After a couple hours of waiting and dealing with the Hertz staff, we finally got a gimpy rental van complete with falling apart interior, check engine light on, no washer fluid, and a right door that doesn't open without pulling off 200 lbs of plastic semi-attached to the van. This Toyota Sienna sucks compared to the luxury we had last year -- a Town and Country with Sto 'n Go, two TVs, Sirius, harddrive, and a rearward looking camera. We eventually got on the road at about 3:30 pm and ended up in north Dallas about 11 pm where I was able to priceline a very nice Hyatt Place for $35.

The next day, we targeted the north-central area of Texas, which featured insane instability, but a lack of good shear. This would inevitably provide the ingredients for HP bombs if the cap could be broken. We spent most of the day in the town of Gainesville, TX, which after checking wikipedia, is famous for nothing.

One of the more common themes you will see while traversing Texas -- Rin Tin Tin monkey love.

The group waiting for the cap to weaken at a park in Gainesville, TX.

It was getting a bit late and convergence along the boundary to our north and west was having a hard time breaking the formidable cap. We began to eye convection forming south and west of us near Breckenridge, TX. This convection was not in our initial target area, but we eventually made the decision to try to chase it down since the stuff to our north was struggling. As we finally approached the northern cell of the bunch near Ranger, TX, the storm shriveled up and died. Yep, typical. We then dove south, where we did finally catch up with a big ol' HP supercell near a town called Blanket, TX. Unfortunately, the road network and setting sun did not provide any help with our attempt to outflank the storm. Thus, in summary, we got a bunch of pictures of "car wash" like stuff -- I assume most of the readers of this blog know what it looks like in a car wash, so I won't bore you with the images. The storm did prompt the smallest tornado warning I've ever seen as the town of Early, TX had a nice, tight shear couplet move atop it. We eventually made it through Early and Brownwood, where we noticed a good bit of light to moderate damage that appeared to be more straight-line induced rather than tornadic.

TVS and attendent shear couplet near Early, TX. Amazingly small tornado warning is the red polygon. Our location is the circle ... you can see we were "stuck" and not in a good place for viewing cloud structure.

Base reflectivity of the storm, including our GPS location (circle).

Okay, one weather-related pic ... a video capture of a lightning bolt in our car wash situation.