The road network and terrain just east of Amarillo were outstanding for chasing during this storm's early life. I hung back east of the storm as it struggled to clear the outflow boundary laid down by extensive mid-afternoon convection.
Multiple small areas of tight rotation came and went as the storm overtook the boundary. One was visually striking, with wisps of cloud curling into it.
After further failed attempts and several convincing tornado lookalikes, low-level rotation became focused just north of the dirt road I'd been following eastward for miles. That road was ending and I was going to have to take my south escape (Hwy 70) to I-40. Had the storm waited another few minutes, I would have been gone, but it produced a small dusty tornado not far to my northwest.
A line of gustnadoes appeared along the gust front to the south and southwest.
Through roads to the east suddenly disappeared, leaving I-40 (well south of the storm) as the only option for repositioning. Meanwhile, the supercell took on an HP mode.
The next stop was FM 291. I didn't venture far northward on it, only far enough to get a view of the mammatus to the north and some typical HP structure. Velocity signatures were only growing more impressive on what was now the dominant storm, but there was no point trying to intercept tornadoes so completely wrapped in rain and hail.
Then it was back east on I-40 to Hwy 273 and northward to W Road.
I took dirt roads eastward to FM 1443. Again I pushed north to see all I could see of the inflow/updraft area; there were some lowerings, but surging rain and hail forced me to bail southward quickly.
I gained some space by going east as far as Shamrock and coming up Route 83 in front of the storm, which was still showing strong rotation. A hill just west of the intersection of 83 and FM 1906 offered the only good viewing south of Wheeler. Despite very impressive velocity signatures (and at one point even a correlation coefficient minimum suggestive of lofted debris) immediately to the west, nothing definitive could be made out in the precip. The bear's cage was visually obvious as the entire east side of the storm rotated around it; how much of it was actually tornado is anybody's guess.
I navigated eastward and northward on back roads, barely making it through a low spot where rain had fallen from a nearby storm, and saw a brief funnel near Kelton on Hwy 152.
That should have been the end of the chase day, but after a pit stop in Sayre back on the Oklahoma side, two circulations moving toward Cheyenne were too strong and too close to ignore. I did a bit of spotting by lightning on Route 283 south of town. Each mesocyclone had a wall cloud or lowering associated with it, but surface temperatures were just a little too cool for tornadoes at this point.
12 hours and 45 minutes on the road, a small tornado or possibly two, and one beast of a supercell. In yet another slow tornado year, today was a good day.
Update: NWS Amarillo's survey determined the tornado east-northeast of Groom was, not surprisingly, an EF-0 with winds around 70 mph. Estimated path length was 2.4 miles and estimated width was 30 yards (quite a bit smaller than the initial dust circulation in the photos). This is a good example of a tornado that probably would never have been recorded two or three decades ago--weak, short-lived, only visible at fairly close range, and occurring in a desolate area.
