Summer Surprise
A round of severe thunderstorms pummelled the Texas Panhandle last Monday...particularly the Amarillo area. I watched a couple of boundaries in the TX PH all afternoon with CAPE values up around 2000+ with some support from a weak impulse aloft. The moisture was courtesy of the remnants of Dolly.
When the storms started popping just N and NW of Amarillo, I proceeded to the north side of town. One tail-end updraft base caught my eye as it produced a "nipple" feature (insert crude joke here) with some dust kicking up underneath it. By the time I pulled over to get a good look, it was gone. So, I don't know if it might have been an attempted landspout.
I hung around Loop 335 and Hwy 136 on the NE side of Amarillo waiting for the core of a rapidly intensifying storm to pass over. Hail started peppering me and increased to the size of nickles which I called in. I played around in the core and nickles was about it. I made my way back to 335/136 to meet up with Jay McCoy.
Another rapidly developing cell to the west approached. What was cool about this one is the descending precipitation "blob" with little fingers of precip "threads" beneath it. It was fascinating to watch because it was so close. Pretty awesome. We played around with that one and then headed south on 335 and punched another, more intense core. The hail was nickles and I think a couple of quarters thrown in. Visibility dropped to only about 50-100 feet a few times as we crawled along.
We made it south to get east of Canyon to await another new storm that was cranking up. Jay went north to sample it as I waited in place. The storm peaked as it got right on top of me. I had the honor and privilege of being directly under the maximum VIL (@65 kg/m2) of the cell's life. :-) The hail really cranked up to the size of Walnuts (1.50" estimated). I erroneously called it in as golfball size because it was hard to get a good visual on the stones through the intense, blinding, wind-driven rain. I called the NWS back and corrected my report of hail just under ping pong ball (walnut).
After this cell diminished, I headed back to Amarillo to eat. I saw some cells building to the west and intensifying. So, I headed out again to get some lightning shots. I got just east of Vega and took a dirt road to get out in the middle of nowhere. I stop and get the camera gear ready and not too far behind me, the coyotes rudely informed me of their close proximity with their yelping. After the hair on my neck relaxed, I got my spotlight out and could see their eyes reflecting back at me less than about 50 yards away. Pretty cool. After spotlighting them a few more times, they eventually departed.
A Sheriff's Deputy checked up on me after awhile. He was pretty nice and we chatted a bit before he went on his way. It seems somebody saw my spotlight and got paranoid...perhaps thinking there were some UFOs :-) I captured what I thought were good lightning shots but, lo and behold, abit out of focus. Argh!! I must have bumped it somehow after setting it. A word of advice...set you f-stop to more than 5.0, adjusting your ISO upward to compensate. This will give you a greater field of depth making focusing abit less of a molecular adjustment. I tried to clean them up abit in photoshop, but still not near as good as I'd like them to be. They would have been some good shots otherwise.
The structure on this storm looked better before I could find a safe spot to pull over and shoot.
Nice rain foot display.
The shreaded leaves from one, isolated grove of trees out here in the TX PH. This was ESE of Canyon.
And now for my out-of-focus lightning shots. It sucks that I didn't have it setup right.
When the storms started popping just N and NW of Amarillo, I proceeded to the north side of town. One tail-end updraft base caught my eye as it produced a "nipple" feature (insert crude joke here) with some dust kicking up underneath it. By the time I pulled over to get a good look, it was gone. So, I don't know if it might have been an attempted landspout.
I hung around Loop 335 and Hwy 136 on the NE side of Amarillo waiting for the core of a rapidly intensifying storm to pass over. Hail started peppering me and increased to the size of nickles which I called in. I played around in the core and nickles was about it. I made my way back to 335/136 to meet up with Jay McCoy.
Another rapidly developing cell to the west approached. What was cool about this one is the descending precipitation "blob" with little fingers of precip "threads" beneath it. It was fascinating to watch because it was so close. Pretty awesome. We played around with that one and then headed south on 335 and punched another, more intense core. The hail was nickles and I think a couple of quarters thrown in. Visibility dropped to only about 50-100 feet a few times as we crawled along.
We made it south to get east of Canyon to await another new storm that was cranking up. Jay went north to sample it as I waited in place. The storm peaked as it got right on top of me. I had the honor and privilege of being directly under the maximum VIL (@65 kg/m2) of the cell's life. :-) The hail really cranked up to the size of Walnuts (1.50" estimated). I erroneously called it in as golfball size because it was hard to get a good visual on the stones through the intense, blinding, wind-driven rain. I called the NWS back and corrected my report of hail just under ping pong ball (walnut).
After this cell diminished, I headed back to Amarillo to eat. I saw some cells building to the west and intensifying. So, I headed out again to get some lightning shots. I got just east of Vega and took a dirt road to get out in the middle of nowhere. I stop and get the camera gear ready and not too far behind me, the coyotes rudely informed me of their close proximity with their yelping. After the hair on my neck relaxed, I got my spotlight out and could see their eyes reflecting back at me less than about 50 yards away. Pretty cool. After spotlighting them a few more times, they eventually departed.
A Sheriff's Deputy checked up on me after awhile. He was pretty nice and we chatted a bit before he went on his way. It seems somebody saw my spotlight and got paranoid...perhaps thinking there were some UFOs :-) I captured what I thought were good lightning shots but, lo and behold, abit out of focus. Argh!! I must have bumped it somehow after setting it. A word of advice...set you f-stop to more than 5.0, adjusting your ISO upward to compensate. This will give you a greater field of depth making focusing abit less of a molecular adjustment. I tried to clean them up abit in photoshop, but still not near as good as I'd like them to be. They would have been some good shots otherwise.
The structure on this storm looked better before I could find a safe spot to pull over and shoot.
Nice rain foot display.
The shreaded leaves from one, isolated grove of trees out here in the TX PH. This was ESE of Canyon.
And now for my out-of-focus lightning shots. It sucks that I didn't have it setup right.
posted by Steve Miller TX at 8/02/2008 12:44:00 PM
1 Comments:
Good job on the photos. Every once in a while we can get a surprise event around here in the summer. I remember back in 2004, we had severe flooding and baseball hail in the city. We also had very poor visibility due to hail fog. This was in the month of August.
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