Severe Storm Photography from Spring 2005
All photos copyrighted by Dave Chapman
May 30th - May 31st:
| May 30th: After dropping off my wife at the Denver airport, I intercept this storm southeast of Springer, New Mexico. |
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| Fairly well-organized storm approaching Mosquero, New Mexico. Unfortunately, I run out of southerly road options and must make a forty minute detour until I am once again ahead of the storm. |
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| View from a lonely highway northwest of Logan. |
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| Large wall cloud, but little or no rotation. |
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| The wall cloud begins to dissipate. |
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| A new larger wall cloud at dusk. Soon outflow takes over and I head to Texas. |
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| May 31st: With early afternoon MCS from Herford to Amarillo, I target dryline in the western Texas Panhandle. This storm develops just east of Clovis. |
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| Ragged but harmless wall cloud just north of Sudan. Nevertheless, tornado sirens go off in the nearby town. |
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| A few minutes later, the storm develops good structure near Amherst. |
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| Between Amherst and Littlefield. |
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| Wall cloud north of Littlefield. Because this is the only decent storm at a peak time of year, the large number of chasers results in traffic congestion and difficult driving conditions. |
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| Strong RFD develops wraps around wall cloud as storm becomes outflow-dominated. |
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| I drive south to stay ahead of the storm, but the paved country road is covered by an unknown depth of water, so I turn back towards the approaching storm. All the east-west roads are very muddy from overnight rains, so I begin looking for a large tree or farm outbuilding to use as shelter from large hail. (This view is looking west; the view north is a dark wall of clouds.) |
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| Just as the first hailstones hit my car, I find this convenient carport in a farmstead just off the highway. This is a good lesson not to rely on small paved roads after heavy overnight rains (I'm glad I learned this lesson with a hailstorm and not a large tornado bearing down on me). It also is a foreshadowing of a potential chaser disaster if a closed road ever places a group of aggressive (or inexperienced) chasers on a dead-end road with a half-mile wide tornado approaching. |
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2005 Storm Pages:
Dave Chapman's Storm Chasing and Outdoor Photo Galleries