Bust near Graham, TX

Chase Recap:

I had a work function that was quite important and was unable to hit the road until after noon. After frustratingly trying to get home from the Weather Center (graduation traffic) we jumped in with JR Hehnly and headed west on I-40. JR had originally thought we might try up towards Kansas, but after looking at the not impressive mid 50s dewpoints up there, we decided to drop south to Texas which was my target all along.

This was unfortunate timing for us, as storms started firing up way down along I-20 when we were still in Oklahoma, and there was really no way we’d get to them in time, so we picked the storm near Throckmorton, as that looked the best at the time.

That eventually was congealed into one supercell by the time it got west of Graham, and we sat under it on our way south and waited for it to do it’s thing. The storm never seemed to get organized and started dying out by looking at the VIL on radar, so we started to drop south to Breckenridge and the southern storm before the Graham storm got tornado warned. After getting out from under the updraft, we were able to see the updraft was quite stout with impressive backshear anvil structure, so we headed back to Graham as it was only a 30 minute drive or so.

By the time we got to Graham the storm started wilting away, and had evaporated into clear air by the time we got to Jacksboro.

This time we were going for the northern storm, which was producing tornadoes at the time. Unfortunately that was gusting out by the time we got back to Oklahoma.

Overall a bust and a frustrating one at that, as all the other surface based storms in the United States seemed to produce a tornado that day.