TUE 26 MAY
We left Roswell NM at an early 8am and drove for hours through SE NM into west TX, stopping briefly for lunch at Fort Stockton TX. We were trying to catch up with a line of storms that was moving about 20-30 mph. Eventually we cut through the line around mid-afternoon as we ran close to the Mexico border. A quick stop for fuel at Del Rio and a cell went up over our heads, dropping numerous close range CGs! By this stage two supercells over the border in Mexico were slowly approaching the Texan border, one produced a very photogenic tornado in Mexico (we couldn't see it as too far away / behind the rain curtain). As these storms came into Texas they evolved into a bowing line, with a substantial read inflow jet to our north (radial velocities around 80 mph which apparently was backed up by a surface wind gust of 79 mph). We kept up with the leading edge of this for a few hours, which exhibited some nice structure at times, and a brief period of rotation as a lone cell ahead of this line was scooped up and absorbed. As darkness began to fall, we tried to go after a separate supercell to the east but this soon died, so we called it quits and aimed to get to our hotel in San Antonio TX before the squall line to the west caught up with us. As this approached the metro a couple of brief spin-ups became apparent in radar data, and a tornado warning was subsequently issued.
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| Severe thunderstorm near Crystal City TX |
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