Day 8 Report & Pictures

[mushymanrob]

wow... thanks a bunch for shareing these pics guys.... awesome.

[Soaring Hawk]

Fantastic pictures, I'm not jealous...

I am.

[Mammatus]

AWESOME pics guys!!

The last couple from Paul.S and Nick's are just stunning!! I simply cannot wait to get out there now, after seeing these shots. I'm literally buzzing inside

I can't imagine the feeling seeing that in-front of you with the frequent CG lightning, wall cloud, multiple cloud rotation etc,.....

Many thanks for the pics Paul, Nick etc...........best yet!!!

13 days til take off

Mammatus

[Gorky]

Time for a big post

Day8 saw me targeting Clovis, NM in the morning, a risky play at that point given it was a little West of the slight risk zone. As it happens, the slight risk got pushed west several times during the course of the day.

Shortly after arriving at Clovis, storms formed way SW some 150 miles away. I didn't go after them straight away but being impatient, and seeing no other activity closer, I made my move after them. Seeing all the other chasers holding put on spotter network worried me though

I made it to a road intersection about 20 miles north of Roswell and had this view of the anvil above me.

Behind this storm, another cell had backbuilt and it was still south of the East-West road through Roswell so I headed down for an intercept. The was showing very strong rotation on radar but at some distance from the storm. As it was not Tor warned, I was looking forawrd to a nicely structured possibly highbased Supercell capable of monster hail. The first sighting of this cell showed it still in it's development stage.

I moved a little closer and stopped to take some more shots. It's looking better and better as every second passes

At this point I'm starting to see the classic 'stacked plate' formation with strongly rotating supercells with a beautiful anvil spreading overhead. On radar, this thing had a monster couplet and I imagine people watching their GRLevel3's must have been convinced it was producing.

Here she is in all her glory. I really didn't want to stop shooting but the parade of cars coming through comlpetely wrecked by hail made me drive a few minutes back before stopping for more photos.

A few minutes later after repositioning

The base of this storm appeared to be bubbling as it spread out above me very quickly. Very weird to look at. Shows well in the timelapse footage I took.

Looking into the hail core. This was producing hail in excess of 3" at this time. Every car coming along the road had at least cracked windshields and dents all over the car. Many had lost the rear window altogether!

Another ragged wall cloud forming. It would do this all the time but never anything consistent.

This shows a very strange scud formation. IT appeared as though scud was decending towards the back, then shooting up into the air in two distinct columns at very high speed. As it was coming straight towards me I didn't stick around but the winds were really strong ahead of this feature. Saw a couple of quarter sized hail stones falling way ahead of the storm here also.

More weird scud formations. The cloud motions were insane again.

About this time, I let the core pass to my north only to be clobbered by hail up to tennisball size shot out with the RFD. A video link will be posted later but here's the results to the car

I ventured back about 30 mins later to search for this missing piece of car and hail was still covering the ground. Largest I measured at this point was 2" diameter but given a bit of melting, and looking at the damage, I'd imagine tennisball sized had fallen.

To finish off the night, I had some spectacular lightning storms. Having never shot still photography of lightning before, I was quite pleased with the results

All in all, an excellent (but potentially expensive!) day!!

And the videos. 2 are reposts ofrome earlier in the thread.

Supercell Structure 'Timelapse'

Hail Storm (Bad language warning!)

Lightning Show 'Timelapse'

Edited May 8, 2008 by Gorky

[Cookie]

great post Gorky thank you