Trentham Stormchasers

'Going to Extremes' 2011 USA Roadtrip

Report: Clyve Herbert

Photography: Jane ONeill / Clyve Herbert

1st May, 2011

1st May: Mt Pleasant, TX to Hope, AR

The La Quinta chain of hotels across the USA is pleasant..they are clean and have comfortable beds and great showers. There are probably hundreds of La Quinta hotels..so sitting down for breakfast and munching through our strawberry jam on toast, I look aghast as Darren and Tracy from Melbourne walk into the breakfast room...of all of the breakfast rooms in all the world they walk into this one - the La Quinta breakfast room in Mt Pleasant Texas!!!! We spend the next hour or so swapping stories of our adventures in the USA - Darren & Tracy are a pleasant couple and the jokes run free....

Today is a rather difficult day for chasing...the cold frontal boundary is moving into NE Texas...there's no shortage of moisture, there is a reasonable cap however. Our main concern is convection along the frontal boundary, which will most likely result with the updrafts being interrupted or cut off by the passage of the cold front. We eventually head SW passing through the very busy town of Tyler...we decide to use their loop road which looked good on the map, but we found ourselves stopping every half mile at traffic lights. Traffic lights can be an extreme frustration to stormchasers - time slows down relatively and it appears that you are stuck for ages at red lights..we finally clear the very busy town of Tyler, or so we thought...we spot a windchime shop...and $145 later we are definitely on the way to Jackson! This is as far south as we think we need to go...

Convection is starting to go towards the congestion stage and some big towers rise to our west. A couple of them glaciate and promptly disappear....we are actually waiting for larger reflectivity on our radar screen with more sustained echoes - this doesn't happen until after 3pm, and we spot a persistent echo SW of Tyler. We head off to the north and try to avoid the Tyler loop road by using farm roads to the west of the city. Larger towers are appearing to our W & NW - some of them are quite strong, however they seem to be having some trouble and appear to be very pulsy. We come to the conclusion that the cold front is undercutting the updraft columns. We dice around the areas west of Tyler, in and out of strong cells, but nothing is getting organised. We decide to avoid Tyler and head south and then east....we remain ahead of the boundary line (cold front), but the multicell complex which has moved NE of Tyler appears to be grouping and has formed into a low end supercell and has sent out a strong RFD on its SW quadrant. This is the death knell of the storm as the RFD mixes with the frontal boundary and undercuts the main updraft core. With fading light and a fading storm, we head northeast to Texarkana and overnight at Hope, Arkansas.

 

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Storm chase vehicle, Quitman

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Patriotic slogan, Tyler, TX (also the line from a song)

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Strange cloud formation over the American flag, Bullard

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Convection exploding on the cold front west of Tyler

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Outflow boundary passing over east of Tyler

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Main street, Troup TX

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Freighter near Troup

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RFD mixing with the cold frontal boundary, E of Tyler

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Sporadic wallcloud on a strong storm NE of Tyler.

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Stay tuned for tomorrow's episode...

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