Wed, April 22nd
The greatest appeal of this day came from location. If baseball fans’ can become misty at the mention of Wrigley Field or Fenway, my tribe worships at the shrine of the Texas panhandle. I spent the night in Shawnee, Oklahoma, thinking I would drive to some latitude/longitude south and west of Childress that afternoon.
The front reacted as expected to the early morning storms and oozed into northern Texas and the panhandle before midday. The hi-resolution models showed that the front would wash north toward Amarillo during the afternoon so I changed my target to Canyon, Texas. This meant I could take free I-40 rather than the high-dollar H. E. Bailey Turnpike. By the time I gassed up in Shamrock, the watch was out and storms were forming along the New Mexico border southwest of Amarillo. I made a not-so-fateful decision to drop south and avoid Amarillo in favor of Canyon. It was a hard call because of where I feared the cell would go before I could reach it, namely the Palo Duro Canyon. Turned out the storm was in no rush, and I worried about something for nothing. Business as usual. I continued west from Canyon, watching the storm via eyes and radar. The moisture was not wonderful that far west so I expected no tornadoes until it got closer to I-27. That part of my guess was correct. It was a high-based cell, but improving. The anvil got crisper and the core grew darker. I zigged and zagged south and west, watching the outflow dominate the processes. I reached US60, east of Hereford, as the rear-flank downdraft bathed the village in dirt. Then, it got weird.
The outflow from hell seemed to stall and the torrent of dust began to rise to cloudbase, and it was rotating. It was not a transient eddy, but an actual relevant circulation. So I was hypnotized at an inopportune moment. While this was happening, a rotating wall cloud developed north of Hereford which prompted a tornado warning. As I put the pieces together, the hail and rear-flank downdraft hit me from the northwest. There was nothing else to do but flee, which I tried. I saw stones larger than golfballs, but nothing like the baseballs that occurred later on the other side of the canyon. The windshield was trashed before I even realized, because of the different forms of precipitation and panicky traffic on US60. The business end of the cell had a nasty hook south of Canyon as it crossed I-27. I was satisfied to just find a motel so I could plan repairs. I did not miss any good tornadoes, from the spc accounts, but I likely would have enjoyed the lightning.
