April 27, 2015

We had one last chance at tornadoes on our Texas chase trip and first run with the TIV crew. Moderate instability and adequate speed shear prompted some modest but chaseable tornado probabilities.

A line of training supercells overnight had created flash flood conditions where we had spent the night in Glen Rose. We could hear the roar of water from our hotel when we got up that morning. Sean and I walked down to the nearby river which had been become a raging torrent. Logs and bits and debris streamed past at rates faster than we could run. We rolled the TIV and van into town to shoot the flooding from a nearby park. The only parking was in front of a shack icecream stand. The TIV attracted a lot of attention and the joint soon became a circus with no place to turn around or park. Despite all the added traffic, the icecream shack owners were getting quite agitated. Several of the crew approached as customers to try and ease the situation but were informed by the owners that they couldn't open due to there not being any parking. Rather than argue the illogicalness of their argument, we realized none of us really wanted icecream anyway, so we piled in and started making for the day's target.

We stopped in Cleburne at the Home Depot to do some maintenance work on the TIV and watch the weather unfold. There was no well defined focal point for initation, just a broad warm sector being grazed by the remaining bit of upper level flow. We spent a good portion of the afternoon staring at visible satellite loops trying to figure out where the first towers would go up. Meanwhile, more fans stopped by to see the TIV including a local fire crew.

Justin Walker practices his yoga poses while we wait for storms in the Cleburne Home Depot parking lot:

We noted some convergence on the satellite and started heading southeast.

Overhead convergence failed to initiate, however, and we drove under fair weather skies. A line of storms erupted about 80 miles to our south, but they looked more like anemic thundershowers than candidates for tornadic supercells. A couple of small funnel reports came in on them, but they never amounted to much or picked up any warnings. We made it as far southeast as Fairfield before we stopped at a dusty truck stop and called the chase a bust. It seemed that subsidence, and weak lapse rates resulting from the training overnight storms working over the air were hampering the supercell environment. Brindley and I said our goodbyes to the TIV crew and started making the long haul for home.