Discovery posted a few trailers for this Sunday’s episode. This was early in the season and I was out with TWISTEX working on the mobile mesonet data acquistion system… we saw some tornadoes and got really stuck in the mud!

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At least 2 tornadoes were observed on 29 April 2009 by myself along with TWISTEX in Floyd County Texas near the town of Cedar Hill. Cedar Hill is a small town east of Plainview on the edge of the Cap Rock. This was my first chase of the 2009 season and I was testing out the new mobile mesonet data acquisition system that I had redesigned during the previous months. The instruments were not yet calibrated and we only had one mesonet system out on this event so I don’t believe any meaningful data was collected.

The atmosphere on this day was prime for severe thunderstorm and supercell development. There was a dryline running north to south through the Texas panhandle with an outflow boundary triple point just north and east of Plainview by mid afternoon. The storm of interest developed on the dryline west of Plainview. As it moved off the dryline it interacted with the outflow boundary rapidly causing the storm to go from high-based outflow dominant to low-based tornadic. A NAM sounding from 0000 UTC near Cedar Hill, TX is shown here (click on the image for a closer view). It showed a decent amount of CAPE with 2347 j/kg, a lifted index of -6.7, and a nice looking hodograph with 220 m2/s2 of 0-3 km storm relative helicity, which resulted in an EHI of 2.9. The mid level flow was a bit lacking with only 35 kt at 500 mb, which might have contributed to this day not producing too many tornadoes. If it wasn’t for the storm/boundary interaction there likely would have been no tornadoes in the panhandle on April 29th.

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The Discovery Channel’s Storm Chaser’s episode: “BIGGER IN TEXAS – premieres Oct. 25, 2009″ will feature the April 29th Texas Panhandle tornado event. I was out with Team TWISTEX on this event… and boy it was an interesting day.

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