Texas Panhandle: March 27, 2019
Heading out for this chase, I knew there was the potential that storms would not fire at all. The environment was fairly marginal, more specifically, there was very little, if any, meaningful large-scale forcing. Moisture looked limited and any storms that did manage to form would quickly move into a less favorable environment. I kept the target area open from the northern Texas panhandle and Oklahoma panhandle into southwestern Kansas, but was leaning north, based on a capping inversion being tough to overcome with southward extent.
I meandered into the panhandles and kept an eye on some relatively weak convection that was moving into northwestern Oklahoma early in the afternoon. That convection was moving into an even less favorable environment, but it did seem to limit vertical mixing just a bit. Dew-points ranged from the low to mid-50s in the wake of this convection across the Texas panhandle, which was somewhat higher than most forecast guidance was progging. This combined with temperatures soaring well into the 70s and near 80, meant that there was at least the potential for the CAP to break to the south of the Oklahoma panhandle.
Around mid-afternoon, I set up in the Oklahoma panhandle, splitting the difference between targets to the north and south. At the first signs of agitated cumulus to the north, Liberal, KS was the next waiting spot. I hung out there for a while, but was not impressed at the weak convective attemps that I was seeing. To the south, some convection suddenly started to intensify near Spearman, TX. Whie this convection was still not impressive by any stretch of the imagination, it did start producing a bit of lightning.
Near Perryton, in the northeastern Texas panhandle, I watched new convection bubble to the southwest, but storms struggled to gain much organization. They’d pulse up a bit, but then the updraft would get sheared out. In addition to weak convergence and minimal large-scale forcing, mesoanalysis and the 00z AMA sounding also sampled relatively weak mid-level winds. Weaknesses in the wind fields and insufficient forcing precluded a more bonafide supercell-favorable environment.
Storms continued to pulse and the final storm showed some transient/marginal supercellular characteristics, briefly, before I ultimately bailed out around sunset.
The storms were certainly not impressive, but I took the opportunity to find a few picturesque scenes before calling the chase day off. Going into the chase, I knew that there was the potential that no storms would fire at all. Since there was some convection, I’d say that expectations were met, although not exceeded by any stretch of the imagination.
An observation was that antecedent rains/soil moisture may have helped keep the quality of low-level moisture better than expected. I drove by several fields in the area that had large puddles and ponds over farmland and that was prior to any rain during the chase. Later this spring, the enhanced soil moisture content may be just enough to help seemingly marginal low-level moisture setups perform. In many recent years, abnormally dry and sometimes severe drought conditions in the High Plains likely had an effect on limiting, to some degree, severe thunderstorm development in the area. Only time will tell if things are different in the spring of 2019.
