Severe Storm near Graham, TX

Chase Recap:

Another day where we got in late and woke up late. I wasn’t even planning on chasing this day, but it looked like super cells were likely in North Texas and New Mexico was looking pretty primed for Tuesday so we decided to get ready and head out in the afternoon.

We headed down I-44 to Wichita Falls then south. By this point a very tall supercell had erupted north of I-20 near Breckenridge and was drifting north. I stopped in Graham really quick to top off the tank as lightning was starting to strike nearby. We barley got out of town heading to the West-Northwest on US 380 before getting into the outflow of the storm with winds in the mid to upper 40’s to around 50 MPH. We had some excitement there, but the real excitement came as we turned north and got into some hail. Sarah and Jari had both not been in a real hail storm, and we started getting hail to almost golfball sized and maybe a few pieces a little bigger.

We turned around when the reports of roofs off houses and trees down in the town of Newcastle, TX and we headed there. I found some power poles which had broken and power was out to the city. There was definitely a lot of tree limbs, but the reports of roofs off houses and what not were quite exaggerated apparently.

I again ran into a technology meltdown when I tried to render video for some video sales. My laptop kept turning itself off while rendering and I wasn’t able to get it to actually render for upload and sales.

After spending about 45 minutes trying to fix my computer, I gave up. Jari spent most of that time shooting some nice anvil crawlers in the rain and I think him and Sarah both managed to get some decent pictures especially once the rain stopped.

We headed out west as I had booked our hotel rooms in Lubbock, stopping first at the Allsups in Throckmorton where I enjoyed my first all sups burrito.

We stopped again out west along the cap rock and tried to get some lightning photos of the small storm which had fired there. We sat there for about 30 minutes and didn’t see any other cars the whole time.