26.05.2025: Wichita Falls - Ballinger - Eden - Menard - Fredericksburg - Junction, TX (395 miles)
Rating:
We start early today beacause last night's storms have temporarily cooled down the atmosphere
a little around northern Texas. Target of the day looks to be San Angelo in Central Texas.
While we hare heading south, the satellite image reveals a clearer picture of what is going
to happen. You can see the orange zone of the enhanced risk, the pink zone of slightly elevated
tornado risk and two white circles with promising cumulus at noon local time. The white arrow
is our driving task to get ahead of any later development: An hour later, at 1 pm, the situation shows a clear initiation at San Angelo. This is pretty much a no-brainer, as the area southeast of this cloud is warm, sunny and moist with dew points between 20 and 22 degrees celsius. However (there is always a however), the road network is not very dense and the terrain is hilly with trees reaching 3 meters height down here. So we have to calculate quite a bit in the beginning, as to where our route needs to be in order to keep ahead of the developing storm:  This is taken just outside of San Angelo with the developing and still young storm in front of us. Do we need to go to the south road on the other side of town, because the storm is backbuilding for a while, or is it coming to us right away and then moving south-east? We decide to stay put and watch the sky:  On our pursuit, this storm turns into an absolutely violent Texan hail- and lightning monster. On top of that, the stucture is more and more intriguing:     It's going green:  Here is a short video of the lightning it throws down on us. This storm appears angry to us: Look at these bolts from the big pre-burst camera, good lord:   Some more stills from the cellphone, we try to show you how excited felt at that moment:       Near Menard, the storm produces a few dust swirls. Tornado sirens are going in this town. We head out of there and then try to look back from a distance, because if there is a tornado going down onto this place, we will be in the way: Meanwhile, the storm still looks as nasty as it gets:  At Fredericksburg, it is time for us to seek a roof for the car and let the storm pass us, otherwise we lose daylight under that green mass of water vapor. It pounds us with stormy gusts and at least golf ball sized hail: The back-side looks great too, what a day this was!  |