April 23, Dawson Co. Texas
I left Norman at 5am on Wednesday morning with an initial target of Lubbock. Early convection in much of west Texas complicated the picture even further. I made it to Snyder, TX around noon after watching a few early morning storms in the area. I decided to continue further west with the dryline still near the New Mexico / Texas border. I made it into Lamesa, TX around 2pm and watched as early storms layed an outflow boundary from east to west across the area. I watched a few storms go up to the east on radar, where I had just been, but I stayed in Lamesa and waited. The storms to the east went tornado warned and ended up dropping a few tornadoes but I 'm glad I stuck tight because another storms went up on the boundary just to my southwest. This storm became tornado warned within an hour exhibiting beautiful structure and dropping a nice stovepipe tornado and possibly one other small tornado.
This was one of the early storms of the day. This shot was taken around 11:30am north of Snyder. I was practicing with some lightning shots and it turned out pretty good.
Wall cloud of intense supercell in southern Dawson Co. TX. This is about 10 minutes after the storm had become tornado warned. This classic supercell displayed great characteristics.
This was just shortly before the storm produced a tornado. I moved to the south further to keep position on the storm as it moved east-southeast. The storm wrapped up gaining a tight circulation and eventually dropping this tornado. I was still driving when I noticed the thin needle then stopped and quickly jumped out with the video camera. The following are all video stills...
Enhanced...
This tornado was on the ground for about 5 minutes before roping out as seen in the last vid. still. I continued to follow this supercell as it moved east-southeast. Eventually it began to weaken and become outflow dominant when another storm began to fire in Gaines Co. just to the west. I drove back towards Lamesa before cutting back to the west to meet the new cell near the Gaines/Dawson Co. line. This storm became tornado warned soon after and displayed great structure once again.
Nicely placed lightning strike as I watched the rapidly rotating wall cloud. Here are some more lightning strikes from the video camera.
This storm would eventually weaken after a couple of good gustnadoes were spun up.
Capturethestorm.com Copyright 2007 Sam Dienst