May
27, 2005 Storm Chase | Northeast New Mexico Supercell
All
photos © Copyright 2005 Matt Ziebell
This
day would turn out to be our last chase day together. So after grabbing
a late breakfast at Denny's in Santa Rosa, we proceeded west then north
towards breaks in the stratocu deck. These breaks allowed for just
enough sfc-based instability and when combined with upslope flow along
the terrain, an isolated Cb came within view ~40 miles to our NNW.
We continued north on HWY 84 and pulled over near Los Montoyas to observe
a rapidly expanding anvil with this lone cell. Also, we observed
a tight horseshoe vortex nearly overhead verifying the ample shear in place
today. Back to the storm, supercell structure soon became evident
along with consecutive wall clouds enhanced by some orographic ascent along
the terrain. This supercell quickly turned due south and we realized
that given the sparsity of roads around here that we'd be good staying
at our present location. This was good in that it allowed some of
us to get incredible timelapses of this beast, especially its dense hailshafts
that buried parts of Las Vegas! No rotation was ever identified with
any of the wall clouds we witnessed, but it was still a great storm to
document.
As
this cell's FFD threatened to run us over, we shot south to I-40 and headed
west for a re-intercept. Unfortunately, the crummy road network didn't
allow us to see much else of significance after this. We navigated
some secondary road south and ran into pockets of ancillary convection
that killed our view of the original storm. After seeing no further
storms of interest nearby, we made a call to head to Amarillo for dinner
and a motel and evaluate a potential last chase for Saturday.
In the end, we didn't see any storms of interest around our target
of Manhattan, KS that day. Our other target of Goodland did verify
nicely, but it was too far west for us to chase given prior commitments.
:(
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Supercell w/wall cloud to our NW
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Horseshoe vortex near Los Montoyas
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Impressive surge of the updraft core
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Hailshaft descends as cell turns south
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One of several wall clouds observed
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Beaver's tail developing
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Broad hail core pushing south |
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Looking west along beaver's tail |
