Dumas, TX Supercell

I found another buddy from undergrad in NEW MEXICO! Mario was actually leading his class from PA on a chasing trip. Funniest thing is that he came up to me at a gas station, where everytime I get questions from people.. and I didn't recognize him with his shades on and thought he was another shmoe wondering if there were any storms coming or what was on top of my car. Once he said "Hi! How are you doing?" I asked, "Mario?!" and could not believe he was there. Awesome!

"Stop Stop Stop! Go Go GO!" Those were words yelled in many of the mobile mesonets today, as we intercepted a spectacular supercell near Channing and Dumas, TX. The supercell was incredible, though the tornadoes were very brief and unorganized.
We were in this town as the tornado sirens were going off - tornado sirens are potentially one of the most unsettling sounds I have ever heard. I heard someone say "tornado sirens are so soothing". I wanted to smack them, because tornado sirens make me cringe.
We took a smack to the windshield from some baseball sized hail. We were lucky the hail didn't take the entire windshild out. This could be a common occurrence, since my probe's storm-relative mission is in the hail core of a supercell. On this storm, we were at one point caught in a small buffer between baseball-sized hail on all sides and the south end of the meso (center of rotation where a tornado could pop out of). Kind of a scary situation as the inflow from this storm just scraped along the ground at a rushing speed. Needless to say, we got out of there.

In time to see a good sunset...