April 21, 2007 Texas Panhandle Tornadofest
E-mail
Last Updated on Monday, 04 January 2010 20:35
Written by Roger Hill
2007
Not much can be said about April 21st that hasn't already been said. Decent moisture, great lift, great shear and a strong dryline would spell trouble for the Texas panhandle region. By mid afternoon, many cells tried to form on the dryline and just couldn't get surface based. Finally about 4 PM storms started to become surface based and it did not take long for them to become tornadic. We intercepted a tornadic storm not far from Dumas and a second one near dark southeast of Dumas. Check out the pics below! Click on a small image to view a larger one.
Supercell gets organized south of Dalhart, TX.
|
Nicely structured storm with vault region, but soon gets undercut by cold outflow from other storms.
|
Supercell with very low rotating wall cloud south of Dumas, TX.
|
Multivortex tornado forms, but remains fairly weak. It lasted for about 5 minutes.
|
New tornado forms near Four Way, TX.
|
Tornado turns into classic wedge as it moves northeast at nearly 50 mph!
|
Tornado is backlit by lightning as it churns across the countryside near Dumas, TX.
|
Cool lightning strike near the tornado!
|
Another tornado forms east of the wedge as the wedge weakens.
|
A new supercell develops and becomes a monster southeast of Dumas, TX.
|
The new supercell produces a nighttime tornado near Sunray, TX. I overexposed this to see if it would turn out.
|
Another overexposed shot of the tornado as it starts to weaken and race northeast.
|
Look closely and you can see a wedge tornado that developed from the same nighttime supercell near Sunray, TX.
|
Damage in Cactus, TX from a different supercell that we did not catch.
|
Significant tornado damage in Cactus. Highway 287 was closed for almost 24 hours.
|
More damage as a semi is overturned.
|