19.05.2025: Wichita Falls, TX - Olney - Nocona - Montague - Muenster - Gainesville - Valley View - Wichita Falls, TX (341 miles)
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Our two coleagues Philippe and Gregory have arrived and will join us for the rest of our
trip! This will grow our team stronger by at least factor 2 and enable us to catch way
more moments of action, especially during driving! We experienced some ptoblems three
days ago in southern Missouri with a tornado coming down about theree miles to the left
of our car while we were unable to stop due to a combination of fast moving traffic and
terrain/visibility issues. Based in Wichita Falls we focus on the southern end of a moderate risk and plan to catch everything that forms to the south of us. Morning convection east of us obscure the situation somewhat, so the relatively simple thinking is, that eny storms that form would be happy to move two three hours in areas that got some insolation and therefore additional surface heating to the already juicy lower seventies dew points in place. Here is the chess board on our Metmaps tool which we use. Some activity southwest of Wichita Falls convinces us, as this would have a few hours of partially sunny weather to travel in:  By the way, you can get a "chaser"-account for this Metmaps thingy here in case you are interested. It runs on the browser on smartphones, tablets or desktop PCs and has data for both the US and Europe. It features some overlay possibilities of risk zones, watches, warnings, reports, observed station values, satellite images, radar (composite as well as level II single sites), lightning, model maps, road network, your position, other chaser's positions, storm tracks and even lodging and major food/shopping chains if you zoom into a town or city.  Anyway, we drive to this developing storm near Olney and watch:  Some serious thunder is hearable, this storm is trying hard to organize:  What we observe today so far, compared to yesterday: 1) The storms never really split into left- and right-movers. 2) The clouds often show an outflow-tendency:  3) This looks still very nice on photos:   4) Golf ball sized hail is still exciting to watch (Montague, TX): 5) Or drive through (between Nocona and Montague, material stress-test of our rental): Overall the storms of today are not very organized or showing any rotation:  Except for this exact moment (May 20, 00:02Z) about 3 miles south-east of Saint Jo, TX   Video, looks pretty obvious to us, but what do we know... Another exciting day full of weather action!  |