VORTEX 2: Day 17
Well, the streak of consecutive days without a watch has finally been broken! The Storm Prediction Center issued a severe thunderstorm watch for north-central Texas and far south-central Oklahoma for this evening.
The armada began the day in Childress, TX after their marathon run-around on Monday. Originally the thought on today was that it wouldn’t be any better than the previous days, but that since it was clear we wouldn’t have much to do for the next few days they would take a shot at finding something today. As the day wore on, it became more and more evident that while shear was extremely weak, there would be enough CAPE in the area in and around Dallas – Fort Worth that a strong updraft might still produce a severe report. The armada headed over to Gainesville, TX and waited for storms to develop. The first storm developed just west of Fort Worth and had a very intense updraft. Unfortunately, due to the size of the armada, chasing a storm in the metroplex is not feasible so they waited for a new storm to develop to the north of the original storm. This new storm never developed, so the armada decided to attempt to play the storm in the metroplex.
While making this decision, the storm grew in size and then split. The northern storm (known as a left split) was identically backwards to what a classic supercell thunderstorm would look like. It moved W and NW instead of E and SE and had clockwise rotation instead of counter-clockwise rotation. The armada raced (obeying speed limits) around the north side of the metroplex and intercepted the storm near Decatur, TX. This storm had several attempts at producing tornadoes, but as far as we know none occurred. It did, however, produce baseball sized hail in the city of Decatur!
While we didn’t “catch” a tornado today, we certainly did have a good deployment and saw a “real” thunderstorm. Now, it appears we will be taking several days off so that we can do personnel switch for some of the vehicles, make repairs, and then head up north for possible deployments this weekend.
About Patrick
Patrick Marsh is a Ph.D. student at the University of Oklahoma's School of Meteorology. He earned a Bachelors of Science in Mathematics and Physics (cum laude) from the University of Arkansas in 2005 and a Masters of Science in Meteorology in 2007. In addition to working on his doctorate, Patrick serves as the National Severe Storms Laboratory Liaison to the Hazardous Weather Testbed where his research interests lie in working with operational forecasters, data mining, data visualization, and all things high-impact weather. For more about Patrick's work, check out his complete CV!
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