To Childress

Hello, chase fans! Today we drove from Corsicana to Childress, Texas. It was approximately 300 miles, and we arrived here early evening. It was a stunning north Texas day, with pretty much clear blue skies and a high of around 34C. It was a fairly dry airmass too so it felt very pleasant. We had to negotiate central Dallas but the freeway system meant that it was fairly free moving apart from the odd slow patch.

We had lunch in Rhome, and then stopped for coffee/frozen strawberry thing (the latter for Helen) at a Maccy Ds in Iowa Park (near Wichita Falls).

We've headed up this way as Thursday brings a risk of severe storms to the Texas Panhandle region. A moist south-easterly flow will pick up overnight and a slow-moving frontal boundary will be in the area. A dry line will likely be across western parts of the Panhandle. Storms may form on the dryline but perhaps more likely close to the front, especially close to the Caprock escarpment, where terrain-forced ascent may help updraughts build into thunderstorms. The upper flow will be fairly weak, but a sharply veering wind profile in the lower layers, coupled with deviant motion of any storm interacting with the boundary should be sufficient for supercells capable of large hail. A tornado is possible close to the front, although the storms may grow upscale into a small MCS as they move south-eastwards along or just north of the front. The thread would then be more of a damaging wind one.

We'll refine our target in the morning but I suspect it won't be too far west or north-west of here.