Target: Shamrock, Texas                    < April 12 | May 7 >

april 23, 2014

Target: Shamrock, Texas

Left Kansas City around 7:30 am and met up with Bill Gargan in Topeka, KS for a trip to the southern High Plains. The set up was expected to be marginal from the beginning, but considering this day presented a rare chase opportunity to the early 2014 season we made the trip out to western Oklahoma.

As we approached Shamrock, TX deep convection initiated in the far eastern Texas panhandle. At Erick, OK we dropped south toward Hollis, OK but stopped short of Hollis as the high-based supercell became very organized. We repositioned to the east/southeast toward Mangum, OK and watched the storm go through several mergers as several weak mid-level updrafts went up to the southeast of the storm. Throughout the storm's lifespan it produced several scud formations that looked at first glance like tornadoes. This was a classic case of tornado-look-alike scud formations that could have and may have fooled many chasers/spotters into erroneously reporting tornadoes.  Unfortunately due to the strong mid-level forcing and perhaps a weak cap the storm never successfully survived all of the mergers with other updrafts. Aside from the numerous weak storms in the area perpetual mid-level clouds precluded good viewing of the main storm's updraft, making photography of the storm very difficult. While the storm's inflow winds (35 mph) were very strong, indicating it had no intentions of weakening the terrible viewing and the seemingly uphill battle it was facing to fight off the other updrafts we opted to drop south to a cluster of supercells in far northern Texas.

As we drove south through Altus, OK we decided that we would not be able to reach the northern Texas storms in a reasonable amount of time, so we ended the chase in Altus.

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