20 May 2019
“It’s a chaser convergence.”
Amarillo, TX to Altus, OK (681 km)
The prospect of a major tornado outbreak had me up early with butterflies in my stomach.
I’d never seen a tornado forecast above 5%. For this day, it was 45%. (Which means there was a 45% chance of a tornado within twenty-five miles of any point in the purple area.) Even some of the long time chasers hadn’t see it this high.
We had to wait for the old van to have new tires installed. The couple of the old ones were looking suspect and they didn’t want to be caught out in an outbreak with a flat.
We had our briefing at nine and headed out soon after. The first thing that was apparent was the sky was cloudy. To get good instability, you need clear skies for daytime heating but they said the conditions by themselves would provide more than enough instability to produce the storms.
We headed southwest, stopping to watch a tornado warned storm that we really couldn’t see in the haze and cloud. A local pulled over to chat with us and Bill asked about closed roads that we had seen signs for but he told us it was okay east of there.
And a chaser pulled over as well and asked if we had internet. He took a look at the screen and went off.
Not sure I’d want to be chasing when you can’t see the storms on radar.
We left the area and went east, stopping in Turkey, Texas for a pit stop and to watch the cloudy skies.
From here, we continued southeast to a system that was warned. There were chasers everywhere along the side of the road.
Radarscope shows chaser IDs as red spots.
And that’s just the chasers who are on Radarscope.
We pulled over to watch this system pass in front of us. It cleared enough to give us a brief glimpse at its structure.
After about twenty minutes, it was apparent it wasn’t going to produce so we continued east and north to Childress with the storm to our left. Bill said Martin Lisius was on a system to the south but the haze and dust was interfering. One brief tornado touched down near them.
We turned north towards Mangum, and for a bit, we were wondering if we’d get anything when this showed up to the west of us.
We piled out and watched the tornado touch down, go back up and go down again as you can see in this video sped up 8x.
We got back into the vans and paralleled the tornado towards the town. We couldn’t see it all the time in the haze but it was there and was quite large. We drove into Mangum and pulled into a parking lot at an intersection. We piled out to see the tornado moving just outside the town.
The sirens were going off.
As we watched, it grew in height considerably.
It passed northwest of the town, causing minor damage to buildings and vehicles. We turned east, and after we got out of town, we could see the tornado had dissipated.
We drove as far as Hobart, Oklahoma looking for more rotation but nothing of note popped up. In the end, the outbreak wasn’t as bad as it could have been. A number of tornadoes did show up on the line of storms but damage was limited.
Bill later said the lack of sunshine had made a big difference in the forecast and cold air from the north was able to undercut the systems. As well, we later heard that smoke from wildfires in Mexico was interfering.
As we turned back west hoping to catch one last storm, the skies to our east were black as night. And it was still three hours to sunset. We left that behind and drove south through Altus, looking for the tail end of the storm coming north. Just south of Vernon, Texas, we pulled off the side of the road to watch a great lightning display.
We stayed about a half hour or so and I fiddled with my lightning trigger and realized that even the flashed clouds worked well into a jumpy video.
Our hotel was in Altus and we headed north with the sky lit up all around us. The rain had stopped by the time we got to the Day’s Inn.
But by the time I settled in, a thunderstorm went over, with some booming thunder. The adrenaline that was pumping all day was cut off abruptly and I was out cold by midnight despite the storm.
Go to Day Nine
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Also see: Chris Gullikson’s Video/Timelapse
William T Reid’s entry for 20 May 2019