Big Country!

Things really didn't look great today, looked like too many storms moving along and north of the front, but since it was a Monday and I was off we just had to get out. We originally targeted Stephensville to Mineral Wells but the dryline was taking it's sweet time. So Abilene made more sense if we wanted to see a storm before dark . We met Tim Marshall along with other chasers also from DFW that had made the trip to the "Big Country" at the local Denny's for a bite while we waited for something, anything to happen.

Finally something appeared on the old radar southeast of us so we were all off on the chase down Hwy 36 to intercept. We settled in front of the storm just west of Oplin for some pics. A rain foot told most of the story here and the storm was moving mostly to the north and it's high base kept splitting so we left in favor of the next storm.

We exited east then south on Hwy 283 for Coleman and the next storm which was starting to look better. Once again this storm was splitting and heading north so we took Hwy 84 northwest for a better view. Soon we could see a wallcloud off to the west and watched several attempts to produce but the best show was the lightning.

One big problem today was that it seemed that every storm was "tornado warned" by the San Angelo office. This definitely did not verify in the field and cluttered things up quite a bit. It's hard to know what's really going on when you can't trust the warning on day's like this. Still a fun chase.