Sunday 21 May 2017

Day 8 - Oklahoma Panhandle

The plan today was to head to Dalhart (TX) in the far northwest TX panhandle, and then reassess from there as to how things were looking. We lunched in Amarillo (TX) en-route and headed up towards Dalhart - a cluster of severe-warned thunderstorms had already formed over SE Colorado, moving slowly (10mph or so) to the ESE and so would push into the Oklahoma panhandle with time. We nudged north through Boise City (OK) and parked just north of town to watch the very turbulent skies. CG (cloud-to-ground) lightning was very frequent with this high-based thunderstorm, and it became very outflowy - in fact, the wind felt icy cold once the outflow reached our location! Nonetheless, it was cool to watch the very turbulent skies with lots of eddies.

Into The Storm - north of Boise City (OK)

The only lightning shot I managed to get - daytime lightning is quite difficult for an amateur photographer!

We headed east to near Keyes (OK) to keep ahead of the storm (where we bumped into Tony Gilbert), and here it became incredibly windy whipping up loads of dust. We followed this thunderstorm complex southwards towards Stratford (TX), but it was weakening all-the-while as it encountered a less unstable environment. The chase was called-off relatively early to head back to Amarillo (TX) for dinner and an overnight stay, to get us closer to the expected action on Monday...

Day 8 into 9 GPS tracker

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