Southwest Texas: May 31, 2019
After storm chasing down in Southwest Texas the previous day, I decided to hang around and chase the same general area again on May 31st. Although some factors for severe thunderstorms, namely deep layer shear and large scale forcing, appearing less favorable than May 30th, there was more destabilization on the 31st. It was also another setup with substantial directional shear. The end result was the potential for at least a few supercells once again.
I started around Fort Stockton and waited for storms to mature after they initially developed off the higher terrain. Once a pair of storms started to show supercellular characteristics, I headed southwest for a closer look.
Near Alpine, one of two dominant storms was started some low-level rotation and a fairly well-developed wall cloud. The storm passed almost directly overhead, but despite a ragged, low-hanging wall cloud, it did not produce a tornado. There were some appendages and scud that vaguely resembled a funnel, but that was as close as this storm came to producing.
The next move was to adjust south and then east. Due to a limited road network and poor cell service, I ended up wandering off course, rushing east toward a storm that was weakening by the time I made it to Sanderson. As a reference point, this is only about 20 miles away from the Mexico border. My initial plan was to just bail this storm chase entirely at this point, as if I wanted to chase Kansas the following day, I was already about 12 hours away.
By the time that internet access and radar data returneed, I opted to head back west and keep chasing, as I didn’t want to go all the way down to nearly Mexico, only to bail out with a few more hours left of daylight. I made it back to the Marathon area, just in time for a slow-moving supercell that was drifting along, just to the north of the main road. I watched this storm for a while and the only thing of much note was that a brief landspout formed. I don’t count it as a “true” tornado, for my chase stats, especially since the dust swirl was clearly disconnected from the storm or any cloud base.
The next move was west, as another supercell was moving directly toward Marathon. I would eventually need to get to Marathon to go north after the chase was over, so this move made sense. I toyed with the idea of finding a place in town to park safely to watch the hail come in, but the only few overhangs I found did not seem very safe. Since I was not certain how large the hail might be, the rational decision was to get out of the way of the storm, so I moved south a few miles.
I watched the hail core pass directly over town and there was some hail, approaching golf ball size, on the southern fringe of the storm, where I was waiting.
Once I went back into town, there was quite a bit of hail, but large amounts of generally sub-severe (1.00″ or less in diameter) hail. There roads downtown were covered in a blanket of white and although it was tough to drive through, roads weren’t completely impassible.
On my way back north to Fort Stockton, I barely made it, as excessive rainfall/melting hail was causing the only direct route to be washed out. Luckily, I was able to get north, as this would have been a major setback for the next day if I wanted to chase again.
