Early on a beautiful wallcloud makes it’s entrance on the first storm flank.

It passes to the east without a tornado but does form this classic tail cloud which almost appears to touch the ground.

The next flank and wallcloud approaches menacingly. Initially it was all wrapped up in precip and may have contained a tornado. There were one or two small tornadoes without condensation funnels on this wallcloud early on.

Ah! The beginning of what we came for.

Perfect!

Here it comes.

Bigger!

Whoa! This one means business! This is after I turned around trying to beat the tornado south to the town of South Plains. The tornado won, and I bailed back north. I was probably within only a couple hundred yards before I turned around.  Here I am proably 1/4 mile or so I believe.

A beautiful dance of destruction!

No words to describe such beauty!

Here the storm pauses to reform another multivortex tornado.

Spinning up new development.

Still the beginning of the next tornado. Look closely you can see dust debris under the cloud.

The first of several shots showing softball hail damage to my Tahoe.

Glass fragments were everywhere!

It was hard to drive in the 100mph tornado inflow jet with the softball hail pummelling me. A couple of times I nearly drove off the road.

One of the many explosive results of a large hail stone. This one instantly destroyed my rear view mirror in an explosion. Fragments went everywhere including my right eye.

Here is a screen shot of Mobile Threatnet in action still displaying the supercellular storm. Notice the white icon position of the vehicle.  This is after clearing the storm and after leaving the town of Silverton where I spent a lot of time throwing water in my eyes to get glass out at an Alsups gas station.

Close up of the storm. While I was driving away it showed me driving under 4 meso whirlies showing 92 to 115mph of wind shear.

My nice new Gateway notebook covered in glass fragments. It took me forever to get it fairly clean.  Glass dust was under the keys.  The touch pad had glass fragments that I kept touching for days before finally cleaning it good.

Here’s the front Tahoe view. You can kind of see the big dings in the heavy metal but this angle / zoom doesn’t really do it justice. Unlike many other chasers I chose not to go under the active wallcloud that was about to produce the multi-vortex tornado.

Alan Dietrich’s (of MESO) vehicle faired similarly but was under the wallcloud as the second multi-vortex tornado developed only a couple hundred yards away. They are probaly lucky to get away with only this damage.  Then again....So am I.

More storm beauty. Courtesy of Mother Nature.

© All images on this site Copyright  Bill Tabor unless otherwise noted