29 April 2009

This was the maiden voyage of the Two Chumps for 2009. We targeted the western portion of an outflow boundary left by morning convection, as it stalled across NW TX in the Floyd-Motley County area. Our target storm formed on the outflow boundary just NW of Matador and developed classic supercell structures with modest cloud base rotation, but no tornadoes. Meanwhile, a storm to the west in Floyd County (just on the E edge of the Caprock) produced two tornadoes. We viewed of these from about 20 miles to its ESE, but weren't sure it was a tornado at the time! The storm appeared to have a large gust front and was moving much faster than our storm, so we guessed it wouldn't be as much of a tornado threat (wrong guess). It did end up overtaking our storm, resulting in a fascinating and messy merger of two right-movers and one left mover between Matador and Paducah.