05.05.2025: Monahans, TX - Lovington - NM - Andrews, TX - Eunice, NM - Wichita Falls, TX (527 miles)
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Today starts sunny and nice here in Monahans. It warms up and the weather models are confident that
storms are going to form later today. Last night, that beautiful supercell with hail from yesterday's
blog moved from Carlsbad through Kermit towards southeast of Odessa and diminished after dark. Such
situations often leave residual boundaries and/or cold pools which can act as a trigger of new storms
the next day, especially when the boundary layer is slightly capped otherwise. Despite knowing that, we get a little impatient and start driving north towards Lovington, because there was also a strong storm there yesterday and this might cause the same triggering effect today. Further more, radar shows a storm with rotation and a warning west of Portales, NM. First thing we notice is the sudden cool air about 5 miles north of Lovington (pink circle in the graphic below, it also shows the temperatures). I have to put my pullover on, which is usually an alarming signal of wrong postioning, even knowing that we are at almost 4000ft (1200m) elevation here. More storms do form northwest of us (orange circle), and the cool and gusty easterly wind with strong directional shear with height in the low levels give us that certain tornado-feeling. However, not far to the east of our location is endless dense stratus which is not diminishing, but instead gaining ground to the west, leaving only a narrow corridor of surface-based instability for storm development, before moving into the drizzle-fog. Further south, there are several mores thunderstorms developing (yellow circles). They have a slightly broader playground before hitting the white fog further northeast:  That's why we give up our Lovington target and head back south towards Andrews to place us in front of an approaching storm cloud moving in from Jal, NM. That storm looks good! There are fractus and scud clouds whirling unter a wallcloud, this is promising:  The anvil area is meaty and aggressivly expanding:   Long grey inflow bands are forming:  Check the rotational and directional movements of that entire system during 40 minutes on this 50x time lapse. Also notice the strongly sheared low-level winds, visible by those low clouds towards the end of the time lapse: Great structures all over the sky, but still the storm struggles to get into high-end servere mode:  This is the moment we leave the storm and head back west towards Eunice:  We spot more towers going up in the distance:  Another good looking approach, we love the vibe of that one, although this storm stays sub-severe most of the time:  A stronger upper forcing is forecast for about midnight, however we plan on starting our drive back to Wichita Falls before that time. So we position us at Andrews once more and wait for another storm cell approaching. Thick stratus is decending on the town, while the storm comes closer:  Despite the cloud layer, bright lightning flickers all around us. We take this storm as some sort of on-board entertainment during our drive northeast, adapt our speed to stay in the notch for as long as possible, put on some decent music and enjoy the night on an empty highway in the middle of nowhere:  At 3 am we arrive home and get rolled over by the storm front a few hours later - perfect! |