June 11, 2005 - Vigo Park - Tulia - Wayside, Texas

Our thoughts that the day might turn out to be a “day before the day” event came true. A strong shortwave was not expected to impact the southern plains until the 12th... but enough instability, low level focus and modest wind shear was able to produce a small area of supercells near and south of Amarillo, TX. I picked up Dave Dowell in Weatherford, OK and continued west into the panhandle.

We took our time driving and made a couple of stops including one near Clarendon before targeting new storm development west of Amarillo. Keeping our options open to check out other storms to the south... we targeted a storm near Bushland. This was a LP storm that had beautiful structure for awhile. Tornado warnings were issued for it and there was a brief time that rotation had increased to the point we believed a tornado was possible. But soon after... the storm became stretched out and when outflow started hitting us in the face, we moved to other storms south.

We targeted a storm northeast of Tulia that had a radar look of becoming the dominate storm. We could see the wall cloud taking shape as we approached. Taking a position west of Vigo Park... it became apparent that the wall cloud had fairly strong rotation. Lightning shot. The first tornado was a weak tornado that formed with an occluded mesocyclone to our west northwest. It was hard to believe that it was possible to get a tornado under such a small amount of cloud mass. I didn’t get good video of the second tornado. It was made up of brief condensation wisps under a very low bowl shaped wall cloud. The third tornado lasted a couple of minutes and appeared to be the strongest of the group.

Starting home.... we drove through the core of the storm that was located over the canyon area to the northeast of Wayside. We got to experience a period of hail larger than golfballs and then took time to shoot some lightning near I-40.