Day 3: Amarillo, TX to Big Spring, TX

Day 3 looked promising again for the Texas Panhadle region. Even as we stopped at Lubbock and the Texas Tech University area a storm developed a really nice anvil:

After lunch we headed to intercept the storm above. As we got close it developed a really strong outflow, throwing out torrential rain and strong winds that kicked up a fast-moving dust cloud that we decided to drive through for fun:

Looking back at the outflow tearing across the fields behind us:

Lots of heavy rain, hail and dust in this storm:

We met with some other chasers on this storm; an Australian and a German tour group:

Some nice structure developed for a time over 'Ponderosa':

Paul S. noticed a boundary moving towards this area of storms, which indicated the possibility of some extra punch to get them going into possible supercells. We repositioned a few miles down the road and sure enough, when the boundary hit one of the storms quickly developed in to a supercell within minutes as we drove towards it. Notice the vivid turquoise/green colour indicating areas of hail in the storm:

We got ahead of the storm as it wound up in to a classic supercell, passing under some extremely close lightning strikes on the way (new underpants from some!), and watched it for several minutes (near Lamesa, TX) until the ligtning got too close:

It developed a nice wall cloud at one point and we were willing it to put down a tornado. There was some rotation evident in the rain bands, but no cigar this time! Still a spectacular storm though:

When it got a bit too close we moved once more. It lost its tornado warning and hail was not large enough to be a problem so we decided to let it pass over our location. The dust it had kicked up into the air created some weird light: