April 27, 2021 Busted Chase

Del Rio, Texas

We had some hope for a decent storm today. There were a couple choices. The first was a chance of storms in the southeastern Panhandle into the Red River Valley area. The convection-allowing models showed these storms to be somewhat clustered and linear, however, with apparently little chance of anything interesting happening. The models also showed (albeit somewhat inconsistently) some pretty hefty supercellular storms developing before sunset near Del Rio. The Del Rio storms were a high risk, high reward type of target. The probability of a storm did not seem to be that high, but the models showed one there, and if it developed, it would likely be something fairly photogenic. We decided to take the risk and drive south to Del Rio, partly because, even if we busted, we would probably have supercells down there the following day.

We drove south from Amarillo and through Plainview. When we got around Plainview, we had elevated (not surface-based) showers and thunderstorms developing to our east through southwest. We continued south and got rained on a bit. When we got just south of Lubbock (as I recall), one of the storms developed and interesting, lower base and appeared to be becoming surface-based. It was still really early, though (around noon), and it seemed to be too early for any interesting storms to develop. We stopped for lunch in Lamesa and watched it move away as some additional showers moved through the area. It turns out the storm with the lowering was probably the one that became a wonderful HP supercell near Electra, TX. It produced a rain-wrapped tornado that only those daring chasers who enter the bear's cage could see. We would not have seen it. Nevertheless, it was somewhat disappointing not seeing this storm!

We were committed to the south target. It took us the rest of the afternoon to get to our target area. Bill took a nice, scenic route through an area that I found to be quite remote and interesting-- from Ozona to Comstock. The scenic route didn't slow us down much because it was a bit more direct to the target area (but a slower road), and it was an area that I probably wouldn't mind visiting again sometime (maybe stay at a ranch or resort type of place). We reached Comstock around 5:30 or 6:00, hoping for a storm, but there was nothing going on. To give us a plan B (something interesting to see if there were no storms), Bill directed us west to the Pecos River Bridge. This was a really neat area to photograph at sunset! There were some altocumulus in the area and may some hints of growth, but there were no storms. We hoped for some larger clumps of these to develop, but they weakened and died at sunset.

The Pecos River, looking north from the bridge.

The Pecos River Bridge.

Looking south towards the Pecos River confluence with the Rio Grande.

A turkey vulture soars by (there's also a great blue heron in the water, but it's a little too small to see in the picture).

A prickly pear cactus flower.

An ocotillo flower.

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Sunset.

The Electra storm (the one we let go).

Our route for the day.

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