We woke up in Wichita and the forecast had shifted the area further south than anticipated so we had to cancel the restaurant breakfast to get into central Texas in time. Once again we found ourselves racing towards getting into position in time with the usual gas stop food and snacks for lunch. The last couple of days’ driving has been insane: from Colorado to Missouri and then down to central Texas.
While we were getting close to our initial target of Abilene the storms had started firing up even further down south than the morning forecast. When you looked at it on the map, it seemed like we were just about to close in on a storm with a perfect hook echo. Then I looked it up in Google Maps only to realize we were 1h 45 minutes away, even thought it was just 2-3 counties away! It really gives you an idea about how big Texas really is.
We had to sit in the car to see tornado reports coming in from the storm, and even though I (at this point) tried to stay away from social media at one point I still caught a glimpse of the incredible white elephant trunk tornado that we were missing out on. Instead of trying to catch up on it, we pivoted onto a storm that appeared in our vicinity. It had some rotation but were never really close to produce anything like a tornado.
There really weren’t many tornadoes this day and we were “chasing” one of the few storms that did produce one. It was however very frustrating to once again not being able to get to the storm in time, only to watch at a distance when it produced a tornado thinking: “If we only would have done this and that we would be the ones down there watching it, instead of driving for hours and hours with no return.
As you can see, there weren’t many tornadoes this day (outside of an EF-2 in east central Texas). The frustration was that were targeting the storm, and was once again looking at it from a (far) distance, while it was producing photogenique tornadoes.
The storm we ended up pivoting to did create some nice structure but was never close to produce a tornado, or the likes of it.
