back home from chasing…

I arrived back into Albuquerque this afternoon. I won’t go into too many details, but it was a difficult two days of chasing to say the least. The 40-50mph storm motion was just too much for me to keep up with. I was under a left moving cell on Thursday that was exhibiting a great deal of anticyclonic rotation, but no tornado. I felt I was in great position on 3 separate cells on Friday, but still failed to see anything more than ragged structure and brief rotation. The fast storm motion combined with low LCLs (essentially cloud bases), fog, and stratus and really limited visibility of any organization. It felt like the equivalent of chasing a hurricane and expecting to see cloud structure. I only snapped about 15 pictures, and nothing really turned out. It was very frustrating…lots of miles and no results on a very active day. I’ve never chased such a fast paced and high-impact event like this. Chasing alone really made it difficult to navigate into favorable positions, analyze the data, keep a visual on storm features, and much less drive with all the hazards of other chasers, deer, muddy roads, 40kt synoptic surface wind gusts, and tennis ball-sized hail. Hopefully the first week of June will give me something.

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