It appears as though this chasecation will go down as the year of the supercells, with yet another one forming over eastern New Mexico yesterday. All supercells look different, and yesterday’s storm was a fairly unique one that was originally a multicell cluster before it was able to separate enough to get its act together.
We spent most of our day in Hobbs, NM yesterday. After waking up and eating lunch there, we sat in a parking lot for 5-6 hours waiting for a good storm to fire. Showers came and went to our southwest throughout the afternoon, but nothing wanted to grow and sustain. Finally, one storm broke through to our west-southwest and started to look nice in the early evening, which is when we finally decided to move. It seems that this year is also the year of fortunate roads, as the storm tracked just north of a major road with plenty of pull-offs for viewing the storm. Unfortunately, with the late initiation and slow organization of the storm, light and time for getting images and video of the storm were fairly limited. We did get some lightning shots in after dark before calling it a day.
Today we continue our quest for storms in Texas, targeting the greater Midland area and perhaps east of there. Unlike two days ago, the boundary appears weaker and is not diving south as it sits just north of Midland, and hopefully it stays that way. Our time for Plains chasing is running out, so it would be great for us if we could finally get a definitive tornado today.
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