2012 Chase Day 1 - Flight and Vidor (TX)

Thu 07 Jun

We woke up at 5am in order to get to Terminal 4 at Heathrow by 5.30am. The plane was delayed by 30mins or so, but eventually we took off ~10am BST for Houston.

The first part of the flight was fairly cloudy below, but as we neared Canada the majority of the cloud cleared to leave some good views of the land.

Cloudy across a good part of the Atlantic west of Britain

Cloud broke to scattered cloud over the north mid Atlantic

Towering cumulus congestus forming over Texas

Most of the flight was relatively calm, but some turbulence near the end of the flight as we passed through a developing cumulonimbus resulted in some passengers being covered in Coke...

Just about to fly into a developing cumulonimbus

We landed in Houston at ~1.30pm (7.30pm BST), and you could feel the heat and humidity immediately as we left the air-conditioned building.

Arrived in Houston

We drove to Chris' house in Vidor (SE Texas), and spent the rest of the day there. However, a line of thunderstorms began to form during the evening hours just to the south of Vidor along the sea-breeze convergence, so we took the opportunity to have an unexpected early chase.

Unfortunately I only had my phone to hand since we literally jumped straight in the car and drove after the storm, and as a result I was unable to take any decent photos of lightning. Nevertheless, it was a good storm with frequent lightning and some good CGs, and as we kept changing our position to keep out of the rain but reasonably close for some lightning shots, we entered close to the core with some seriously loud thunder and quite close CGs. It was one of the best storms I have ever seen in comparison to UK standards...