Day 3: Wednesday, May 20, 2015
Chase Day around Fort Stockton, TX
Beginning City: Plainview, TX
Ending City: Fort Stockton, TX
Total Miles Traveled: 297 for the day, 1713 for the trip

Today’s Recap by Megan Matheus and Maggie Paucek

Today we traveled south from Plainview towards Midland, TX. In our morning briefing, we observed that the jetstreak was pretty weak as was the dryline, but the CAPE looking good. We decided that south would be our best option to travel, and we would reassess after reaching Midland.

Once we got to Midland, we decided to continue south-southwest to Fort Stockton where a few cells were starting to fire. When we briefed in Midland, the dryline was developing more than we thought it would in the morning and CAPE was developing as we expected.

When we got to Fort Stockton, we got on a cell right away. Right at the beginning it looked like part of the storm was lowering and the radar showed slight rotation. As the storm approached us, it started to produce cloud-to-ground lightning so we had to move to a second location for safety reasons. When we first arrived at our second location, the clouds were very photogenic but the started to weaken. All of the other strong storms were either to far east or south past the US-Mexico border.

We are spending the night in Fort Stockton because it looks like any significant weather we get will be in this same area.

Radar image from a storm north of Fort Stockton, Texas. The red dots are other spotters and chasers.

Picture of the rotating updraft base at the same time the radar image was taken. The rotation remained very broad and then the storm moved into an area with limited roads and we called off the chase.