Closing the door on what turned out to be a relatively uneventful season.  Rob and I made it into the Texas Panhandle and had a brief period of optimism watching vigorous convection near and west of Groom.

We followed a developing supercell south before it became clear it was going to be dropping off in a bad road network around the canyon.  We elected to head north toward Borger as a more isolated supercell moved almost straight south.  It had some nice convection at times and some pretty good structure, but it always seemed a little strung out on radar and couldn’t get a lot accomplished other than producing some large hail.

We saw some nice sunset color near Shamrock and called it a day.

We worked our way west through Arnett and down to Canadian where we watched storms slowly organize from our southwest through northwest.

We finally settled on a low precipitation supercell that formed near Miami and led us all the way east to the Oklahoma border.  It had some really pretty structure at times and did produce some large hail, but never came close to a tornado.  Still, some good views:

This was a high stress day where we picked up a supercell storm that formed in extreme northeast New Mexico – then had to stay ahead of the fast moving storm as it moved southeast reaching Borger, TX.  Near Borger, another supercell formed to its south and also moved quickly southeast toward southwest Oklahoma.  The combined storms produced several small tornadoes (we could not confirm) – and a tremendous amount of large hail.  We encountered some of that hail along I 40 near Lela, TX.  Stones near Lela were measured to be between 5 and 6 inches in diameter.

A relatively uneventful day that had us bouncing around from storm to storm in southeast Colorado… none of which provided anything too dramatic.

We had a narrow target which worked out about exactly as expected… picking up a supercell storm east of Trinidad, Colorado and staying ahead of it as it moved southeast toward the western end of the Oklahoma panhandle.  The storm did provide some pretty structure at times and was responsible for some very large hail reports – upward of baseball size.

While in a non-chase mode, roaming around southeast Colorado and southwest Kansas, we paused to watch developing slow moving convection from near Saunders.  We found a few old buildings to frame with the weak storms, and then found ourselves in the right place at the right time to observe a short-lived landspout tornado.  Our guess is it was a couple miles northeast of Lycan.

We dropped south to near the Red River southeast of Walters and then began hopping from storm to storm back northeastward through the Rush Springs and Ninnekah areas.  Despite a high amount of moisture and instability, storms struggled most of the afternoon and evening.  They either had small volume in the mid levels despite fat bases, or skinny bases and loaded up upstairs.  Overall, there was decent structure to be had and we had a few times where a tornado looked possible.

Another day to north Texas and another day with minimal results.  We did manage to see some structure and sky color, but overall the day wasn’t very exciting.  A few images taken from near Harrold, Kamay, Archer City, Antelope, Shannon, Newport and Joy, Texas:

Well, this wasn’t the most exciting chase day, but it was a good chance to get out with first time chase partner, Robert Satkus.  We took a drive down I-35 and stopped near the Red River southwest of Ardmore and enjoyed the warm and moist air.

The better looking storm development was occurring on the Texas side of the river and we made the short jump southwest – staying ahead of storms as they approached Gainesville.  Honestly, there wasn’t a lot to get excited about.  About 4 miles west of Kingston we took up shelter and let an approaching severe storm roll over where we measured 1.24″ hail.  This was my first severe hail to document in Marshall County.

We called it a day after the hail and rolled back north enjoying some BBQ in Ardmore before heading toward Norman and home.