Trey Greenwood
May 13, 2015: Chasing Blind in Extreme South Texas
SUMMARY: Coming soon.
May 12, 2015: Surprise Landspout and South NM Chasing
SUMMARY: Corbin Jaeger and I departed for our Plains trip early on May 12. Our plan was to head toward Fort Stockton, TX for the night in order to get in position for the setup on May 13. However, the SPC had issued a marginal risk for severe thunderstorms with damaging winds and small hail across much of New Mexico, so we decided to try and chase any storms on our way to Fort Stockton, with Las Cruces, NM as our back-up place to stay if we were out chasing late. After stopping in Benson, AZ, for gas, we continued east, and before long we were crossing the AZ-NM border into New Mexico. Shortly after we crossed the border, our jaws dropped as we saw a whirl of dust begin to rise toward a developing updraft base just west of Lordsburg, NM. We quickly determined that it was a landspout tornado and pulled over to watch it. The landspout lasted for about 5-7 minutes before dissipating; it was an incredible suprise to start our trip.
I have received some skepticism from fellow chasers and even an National Weather Service office regarding whether this was a landspout or a dust devil; however, I have no doubt in my mind that this was a landspout. The main things you need for a landspout are a surface boundary on which vorticity (rotation) exists underneath an updraft (towering cumulus cloud).
Here are a few pieces of evidence that support that this was a landspout:
1. Dust devils form in sunny, warm conditions. There was absolutely no sunshine in the area, and it was fairly cool outside.
2. It was right underneath a new updraft base, where landspouts always form.
3. There was a surface cool front right over our location, which provided the boundary on which vorticity existed to produce a landspout.
A landspout does NOT require a visible connection to the cloud base, as well. Also, I received word that you need full-fledged storms in the area for landspouts to occur, which is absolutely not true. A landspout can form under a small towering cumulus cloud, as long as the updraft is strong enough to lift the vorticity on the existing boundary.
Alright, back to our May 12 chase. After the landspout dissipated, we continued east toward some strong storms that were firing up near Deming, NM. We stopped in Deming to watch the storms for a moment; the one above us had a very ragged base. A very strong storm with a visibly large hail shaft had fired up just east of Deming, so we blasted east. However, the storm was moving very quickly to the north, and there were no road options that would take us to the storm. After discovering some technical issues with our live stream, we headed toward some storms near Las Cruces, NM, but they fizzled out before we could get to them. We called the chase at that point; after having dinner in Las Cruces, we headed to Fort Stockton, TX, in constant moderate rainfall.
CONCLUSION: Success. Although we were not able to keep up with the actual storms in southern New Mexico, we caught a surprise landspout tornado west of Lordsburg, NM, that made the chase!
CHASE VIDEO: Landspout West of Lordsburg, NM