Day three....and the dryline giveth

The third day of VORTEX2 operations started about the same as the first two...cold and drizzly. However, today we at least had the prospect of storms, and we left last night's lodging in Clinton, OK headed west for the Texas Panhandle.

The upsonde units were slated to launch two pre-convection soundings, with my team joining the NSSL2 truck (Matt, Kate and Dave) in the thriving metropolis of Tulia, TX (note: Tulia is neither thriving, nor a metropolis). They got to town before us, so they took the lead on the sounding, getting set up at a local park. Tim and I arrived in time to help fill the balloon and take the site pictures and the balloon was released at 2:05 PM CDT.

After waiting for the balloon to complete its ascent through the troposphere, we joined a large part of the armada on the other side of Tulia for a short spell, before Tim and I were redeployed west to Silverton, TX to launch another sounding, just as storms were beginning to develop along the dryline.


Downtown Silverton, TX as a storm rolls in

We reached Silverton in about 45 minutes, and soon had our sounding equipment ready and a balloon in the air. It indicated that the atmosphere was still quite dry in the low levels, which made sense as the storms that were developing were rather weak and none were organizing into the supercells that we were looking for.

Ultimately, we ended up spending the remainder of our day in Silverton with the armada, eventually joining the convoy for the trip east to our lodging location, jumping into line right behind one of the Doppler on Wheels (DOW) trucks.


Rolling down the highway behind the DOW

As luck would have it a storm that had developed to our south eventually became a supercell and passed over our lodging location just as we were arriving, dropping some small hail, and making for some amazing lightning. Unfortunately it was too late for us to deploy for this particular storm, as the sun was beginning to set.


Precipitation core in a supercell south of Childress, TX.

Overall, I'd say this was a pretty good first chase day. Between the whole team, we launched several successful soundings, although we never actually did deploy for a certain storm. There were some communications issues, but we anticipated that going in given the cell service in this part of the country, and hopefully we'll be able to adapt to overcome these on future missions. For now, though, it's time for bed, as tomorrow looks to be another active day!


NCAR1 (my truck!) with a rainbow