When David Douglas and I arrive it is already fairly dark, and a large, dark wallcloud looms menacingly in the distance. We are actually in the Medina River Valley and so much of the area around us in higher terrain. We briefly wonder about possible flooding.

As the majority of the area of rotation passes to our northwest there are numerous lowering and funnels. It is difficult to tell if any are in contact with the ground.

One of the clearer pictures. I had difficulty finding infinte focus and the right exposure setting. A little bif ot the wallcloud / funnel to the left with a heavy precip (no doubt hail) core to the right of that.

A fairly large wallcloud very near.

Here near the wallcloud we see various size of funnels with extensions toward the ground. Note the one left of center has some cloud material extending down behind the trees. There was quite a bit of movement with these features.

A reasonable shot of the bowl shaped wallcloud with a funnel to the left of it. There almost appears to be a bit of an inflow stinger on the right side of the wallcloud faintly seen.

Our position near the storm as shown on Mobile Threatnet. Our location is the white car shaped icon bottom right of the storm cell.. The red round circles are rotation shear markers indicating possible areas of tornadic activity. As I recall some of there were showing over 100 mph.

The storm continues to move northeast passing northwest of us. There are quite a few areas of rotation showing now. In this instance Threatnet is actually showing a hook BWER (purple region) which is somewhat unusual because it has fairly low resolution. Some believe the more shear markers showing in one area the greater chance of a tornado.

Shown above are the WDSSII Rotation Tracks radar product which is sort of a 3 dimensional summation of multiple radars based on the velocity products. Green is mild shear,, yellow is more significant and indicative of a possible tornado path, red, and then white are even stronger indications. Our location I have marked with a red ‘X’ so that you can compare it to our position as seen on Threatnet.

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