Yesterday did not look like a particularly good day, with the primary threat being multicell storms. We went after it anyway… because why not? We headed south from Lamar, CO toward Clayton, NM. On the way, we watched cumulus towers going up behind some beautiful landscapes.
We targeted a nice cell that appeared to be trying to organize, and stopped to observe some nice anvil structure on our way to the base of the storm.
The storm was fairly photogenic, with some nice green tint to it.
Unfortunately, the storms were beginning to coalesce due to the lack of a meaningful cap. We headed east to get out of the way and observed two interesting features on our way – some nice anvil structure, and some cumulus towers that had been overspread by anvil material from the main storm. It was very bizarre to see convective towers under another cloud structure.
We stopped again to observe the front flank of the storm, and didn’t really see anything other than a shelf cloud.
We continues moving east and saw what we believe to be a very, very brief landspout tornado. I caught just a bit of it; it was very faint and rather far away. Around the time we stopped to look at this, lightning struck a field less than a hundred yards from the car; it was extremely loud and close enough that we could see the puff of smoke rising off the grass where it had hit and feel the shockwave.
We stopped again to observe a gust front from a southern storm colliding with our storm. It was causing a lot of vorticity and it appeared that a tornado may occur nearby. I spotted some rising scud clouds and started keeping an eye on them. The feature I was looking at is in the center of the frame below. I also got luck enough to catch a lightning strike in the same frame.
After watching it for a couple minutes, the feature started to become laminar and then became a funnel cloud.
Chris spotted it about the time I started yelling to Robert that we should go, and we all jumped in the cars to head east and get to a safer place to observe the circulation. Nothing ever came of it, but it was certainly an exciting few moments.
A good chase day conjured from nothing at all. We then headed west to Vega, TX for the night. We fought some flooding on the way through Amarillo, TX but got through after some maneuvering.
It’s uncertain what we’ll be doing today; stratiform rain has settled in and that seems likely to choke out any potential for severe weather.
We’ll see.
Giving Chase 
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