Date: June 7, 2014
Time: 2:45 - 9:30 PM MDT
Place: Ragland, Santa Rosa, New Mexico
Distance: 598 mi (317 positioning, 157 chasing, 124 to home)
Camera: T3i, GoPro3 Silver & Black, Lumix
Warnings: SVR
Rating: S4

Forecast and Set Up

Today concludes our amazing week-long chasecation. This has been a really incredible and eye-opening experience with each day providing something interesting and unique. Chasing lower-probability setups -- ones that I usually couldn't leave ABQ to chase - has been especially rewarding. At the same time, being out in the plains for 8 straight days really starts to blur the memories together in my mind (especially if I wasn't keeping this log). So in the end, while I've loved this experience, I'm not sure that I prefer it over the more targeted chases we usually choose.

This morning, we left Garden City, KS and headed south towards Amarillo. Our first chore of the day was to visit the Subaru dealership and cash in our free oil change (they probably thought we'd never be back in town, little did they realize). It's hard to believe we've already put 7000 miles on the Crosstrek. Along the way, we crossed the dramatic Canadian river valley on Hwy 70 in the northern Texas panhandle. I'd never appreciated the scope of this river valley as it carves a 25-mile-wide gash into the surrounding flat countryside -- marking the northern edge of the Llano Estacado mesa. This is definitely why chasing in the northern Texas panhandle can be a challenge. Interestingly, we had another neat encounter with the Canadian river a couple years ago on a bust day in New Mexico (April 29, 2012).

With fresh oil and a full tank of gas, we made a quick stop at our favorite Amarillo BBQ spot for some Frito Pie (Crazy Larry's -- where the amazingly nice owner remembered us from a previous chase) before heading southwest targeting Clovis, NM. We couldn't have asked for a more convenient setup for our final chase. A stationary boundary was laying from Lubbock westward into New Mexico. North of this boundary, ESE winds were feeding mid-60's dewpoints into the NM high plains while a belt of mid-level westerly winds provided 35-50 knots of shear, and the 2PM SPC convective outlook placed a 10% tornado probability over our target.

We watched the agitated cumulus fields from Bovina, TX until some radar echoes near Tucumcari started to catch my eye. Initially two towers struggled to develop, but after each underwent a split, the right-split storms exploded into parallel supercells just south of Tucumcari. We had our storms.

The Chase

From Bovina, we had good roads to cut north and then west towards the organizing supercells, but it still took most of an hour to get into position along Hwy 209. Along the way, we ingressed into the shadow of the anvil high overhead and began to get tantalizing looks at the supercell structure on the horizon to the northwest. I briefly considered cutting north at Hwy 278, but this seemed to take us more into the forward flank of the lead supercell. So instead we followed Hwy 209 further west towards its northward jog near the non-existent town of Ragland, NM.

Upon arrival, we were greeted by a breathtaking sight -- both meteorologically and geologically. The highway's northward turn towards Quay occurs right at the northwestern escarpment of the Llano Estacado -- the literal boundary of high plains and high desert. Within a few hundred yards the landscape transitions from flat grasslands to red rock buttes -- an amazing juxtaposition. As the highway rolled down from the huge, flat mesa, we got our first great view of the supercell's RFD region with an enormous horseshoe arc and lowering already in progress. Pulling a quick u-turn at the base of the escarpment, we got out the cameras and began some amazing timelapse sequences. As a bonus, we were also in that magical interface between the RFD and inflow that provides calm air to fly the quadcopter!

With all cameras rolling, we got to watch various RFD surges and retrogrades for over 20 minutes from the same location. This was by far the most successful deployment of the drone, and I flew longer and higher than on any previous storm encounter. Amazing blue-hued structure created beautiful contrasting visuals. As the supercell continued to lumber southeast, a new RFD surge began to tighten up into a new lowering. We finally needed to reposition and retraced our steps back up onto the mesa to get downstream from the new feature. Within minutes were we in perfect position in front of a rapidly rotating wallcloud with spiraling rain curtains. I was sure we were about to get a tornado, but just as everything looked like it was coming together, rain began falling on our position. Out of nowhere, our perfectly isolated supercell developed an enormous rain shield on its southwest flank. Just as the storm was looking most promising, it all fell apart. We briefly thought about pursuing the cell southeast, even in its rain-wrapped state, but after so many days on the road we decided to abandon the storm and start the journey home to ABQ.

Along the way home, we had to thread our way through lots of other cells -- a very unusual situation for New Mexico after that last few years' drought. Just after sunset we watched a small cell decouple from the boundary layer and go elevated -- literally shedding is lower base and taking on a new, higher bottom edge (something I've never witnessed so clearly before). Near Santa Rosa, we waited in the dark, lonely outskirts of town as another severe storm pushed across our path with an intense hail core that I didn't want to drive through. While I was standing outside the car waiting in the utter darkness, lit only by flashes of lightning, I happened to shine my phone over to the side of the road and saw dozens of pairs of eyes reflecting the screen light. After an instant freak out, I realized that we'd attracted the curiosity of a herd of cows in the adjacent field. They'd silently all snuck up to the fence beside the car and were just staring -- creepers.

Recap, Filmmaking Notes, and Lessons Learned