Storm chasers traditionally have a steak after seeing a tornado. If you have time. The irony is, when you’re busy chasing, you don’t have a ton of time to stop at a steak house or even an Applebee’s. So sometimes, you end up anticipating the tornado with a steak in advance. Especially if you stop at The Big Texan in Amarillo.
That’s where Alethea Kontis, Jason Persoff and I had lunch on May 28, 2023. Jason was happy with his chase the day before and didn’t plan on going out, so we said farewell after lunch, and Alethea and I went in search of storms. Chances weren’t high of a tornado, but what followed was an extraordinary sequence of events that culminated in a tornado and a powerful, highly structured supercell in the Texas Panhandle.
Beautiful structure evolved in the storm.
We aimed for initiation and watched a few clouds grow into a shower and then a lovely spinning storm, which we followed until it dropped some hail and headed off into unreachable territory … even as more storms formed to the west on what seemed to be a boundary. Were they forming west or moving west? Or both? The storm motion seemed cockeyed, but we kept on a storm whose persistent rotation drew us closer … and then we spotted the tornado. It persisted for a while, a white cone whose wispy point danced sinuously on the ground southeast of Stratford, Texas.
The tornado southeast of Stratford, Texas.
I thought another area of rotation was going to be the next tornado, but the stars didn’t align; if it did happen, we didn’t see it. But we got in front of the storm, which became a massive, layered behemoth sending out sparks of lightning as the sun began to set.
What a beauty!
With storms now coming at us from the north and west, we elected to move south and avoid the pincer maneuver while getting a few more shots. What a stunning storm!
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