May 26th report

Hello. We left Amarillo with a fairly broad target area, centred around Boise City, in the far west of the Oklahoma Panhandle. We also wanted to keep options open for heading into Colorado too, to the secondary target area.

We got to Boise City, and a storm was already in progress to the north, moving NE through SE Colorado. We got some lunch, and waited for a while as we were still interested in developments where we were. A lot of low cloud was around our area, though, as well as a few elevated thunderstorms to our east. After a while we thought it might be best to try to intercept the Colorado storms, and plotted a route up to Syracuse, in western Kansas, to be ahead of it. We drove as far as Elkhart, Kansas, before deciding this was a futile effort, and our attention turned to the clearer skies in NE New Mexico, where clouds were bubbling.

We headed back to Boise City and got a snack. After a while, a couple of storms to the SW of Clayton, New Mexico, were starting to look interesting, so we headed SW to look at them - we paused at Clark's Monument - a small marker which shows the far NW of the Texas Panhandle.

We then continued to Clayton, where the storm was taking on more of a supercellular appearance - we headed NW out of town to intercept it - but this placed some rain in the way of the updraught area - and a brief tornado was out of sight from us. We quickly dropped back to Clayton and then a little south-west - we saw a well-marked low-level updraught region, and a funnel developed for a time - we're unsure whether this was another tornado.

The RFD occluded the low-level updraught and we couldn't see it - apparently a tornado continued within the rain, but we couldn't see it - so we moved ahead to get a nice view back at the storm.

We headed NE back towards Boise City - a line of storms was now present to the west and a surging area of rain to the SW induced a small-scale circulation, which became tornado warned. We peered at this for as long as we dared but saw no tornado. We arrived in Boise City as a premature night descended on the town, tornado sirens blaring.

As we were just getting to the eastern side of town the leading edge of the rain curtains/high winds overran us - and for a brief moment it was quite scary - cars had stopped under a bridge, and we had to get around them - and then blasted east at a decent clip to outrun it.

We then got a way ahead - but the storm had lost decent structure, so we decided to head the almost 2 hours up to Garden City, Kansas, for the night.

We had some storms as we got to town - with high winds, which caused some power flashes. We had to get a McD's as nowhere else was open.

All in all, quite an exciting day after a period where it was quite annoying! It just shows that patience is required for this - something I don't always have!

Another risk of severe storms tomorrow - less extensive, with perhaps NW Kansas/NE Colorado worth a look - or the dryline, but we'll decide that tomorrow.