God Bless Texas...

White tornado, North of Colorado City, TX. Click photo to view full sized.

We closed out the 2008 MESO storm chase with a home run. We caught 3 tornadoes today about 45 miles west of Abilene, TX, between Colorado City and Snyder.

Our chase kicked off with a fine breakfast at Granny K's Kitchen in Scotland, TX. We highly recommend stopping at this little hole in the wall for a bite to eat, you will leave stuffed and satisfied. From there we headed South and West to I-20 and then further West from there. We went NE from Roscoe, into Snyder after a cell which had shear on it for well over an hour. From Snyder we went Southwest to find our first tornado have a short lived touchdown on the horizon. We tracked the cell avoiding the rain and hail, and got a very pretty white tornado briefly and then a third funnel cloud with a spin-up on the ground.

We went South of I-20 to try and regain position on the cell and ran into a flooded Loraine, TX. Water was running down all of the main streets of the town. After driving South on a gravel road that was not going where we wanted it to, we stopped and chatted with a truck parked where we were about to turn around. The driver was Greg Morgan, KOSA-TV, CBS 7 meteorologist out chasing storms. We teamed up with him for a few minutes then parted ways, but we made another friend in the storm business.

We then resumed the chase after our cell but decided to call it off after a successful day and spend the night in Eastland, TX. We had Texas Chinese food tonight - not bad. Tomorrow we will start to make the trek back to KC, sight seeing on the way.
Tornado #3 with a brief spin-up.