April 13, 2007 - Strong Rotation/Funnel in NW Texas


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Chase Summary: This day turned out to be pretty much a bust, considering the high expectations for the event. Conditions looked perfect for isolated tornadic supercells, and the potential was there for strong tornadoes. The SPC even upgraded to a high risk with a 30% hatched area for strong tornadoes in their 20Z outlook, but it didn't really pan out. Myself, Adam Atkins and Dave Holder started off near Burleson, TX waiting for the situation to develop, and for storms to fire. We targeted this area and points south because the potential for airmass recovery in advance of the dryline looked best in this area. Also, the models were consistently developing a pre-frontal trough with initiation well east of the dryline in a more favorable area, so we were careful not to get lured into anything further west too early. This is why we decided not to fly NW towards Haskell County after the storm which would eventually produce; we were counting on development further east later on, but unfortunately this never really happened. A double-dryline structure/pre-frontal trough did eventually develop, but the two quickly merged and any hope for a major outbreak was gone in my mind, since storms would merge forming a line, and the low-level flow was likely too veered near the dryline.

Still, we did see a nice storm before a solid line formed a little SW of Lone Camp, TX, just west of the big lake in that area. We drove north of I-20 and quickly found ourselves trying to outrun a very cold and fast-moving rfd. We eventually found the inflow region and the storm came very close to producing. We were very close to the wall cloud, and a funnel shaped feature began rotating very quickly in picture 01, as new scud also began to form beneath it. A more laminar funnel can be seen in picture 2 (4:42 CDT), but nothing ever touched down. The storm also became tornado-warned around this time, but our road options were limited so we had to head back south and then east... Here are radar and velocity images from around the time we observed the strong rotation and funnel. As a side note this was my first chase with my new Canon XTi; it seems like a great camera so far.



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