Friday - Witcheta Falls TX

Home of the 1979 F5 Tornado that went right through the town.

The day started with what looked like an 8 hour drive south again towards and into Amarillo. Just as we left the hotel, we ran across the TIV - Tornado Intercept Vehicle. You read more about this here. Not sure if I would go for a ride in this thing or not. Short story is they are trying to get some Imax video from the inside of a Tornado. And, 2 guys get to go along for the ride.

At lunch time we could tell from the Threat Net (our mobile radar) that the only possible Tornado in our area was to the SE of Amarillo and it was moving away at about 20mph. So, that means we really had to haul butt to overtake this storm. The road gods were in our favour, so we managed to do that by about 5pm. We had to stay to the paved roads as all the secondary roads were just flood from the storms previous this week. If you've never been here, Texas, like the rest of the plains, is just 1 flat bowl with no where for the water to flow to. So, it just sits in the fields and ditches.

We punched one of the smaller cores (of the storm) and then stopped to get gas. Now, this station doesn't look like much (photo here), but it also served dinner. I saw an amazing meat and potatoes dinner on several plates, and I could have stopped there for dinner, but we had to go. If it hadn't been the only gas in town, we wouldn't have even thought about having dinner here.

Just as Ron was pumping gas, there was one great nearby ligthning strike.. and I mean near. We all scattered inside while we left Ron holding the nozzle. Ben added his encoragement by telling him he was recording him on video just in case something happened.

Sadly, this storm just didn't want to get organized for us. It was the only Tornado watch box in the US at the time, so, we were in the right place. The scud cloud was trying to get sucked in, but again, no joy. As it started to loose definition, we called it a day and headed back north and had to punch another core. Lots of water... little hail.

I also got a chance to get the daytime lightning trigger to work. I was able to take pictures of the lightning from a moving chase vehicle. It took alot of setup on the Nikon D200 to get it to work, but it is doable. Here is one picture of it in action.

Our Garmn Nuvi coughed up a Steak House for us to chow down at. The Garmin has about a 50/50 chance of actually giving us something current. This time there was success and we had a great meal.

Yesterdays pictures start here.