Day 12: June 7, 2014

Total Miles: 431

Total Driving Time: 8 hours and 0 minutes 

Today was our last chase day! We left at 11:00 am CDT and did our weather discussion on the road in order to be in good positioning for where storms were expected to develop. We headed west towards New Mexico and stopped for lunch in Tucumcari, NM. After lunch, we went 20 miles south to watch a small storm and get closer to the pre-existing outflow boundary. We left this storm and headed west then south towards a a second storm developing around Fort Sumner (~2:40 pm MDT).

 

Around 4:15 pm MDT a wall cloud could be noticed with this storm (we were 15 miles west of Fort Sumner). We kept with this storm for some time and then decided to head southwest towards storms that were intensifying around 5:50 pm MDT.

We had to move fast in order to get ahead of these storms and avoid the hail core. The one storm had a well-defined updraft and soon the storm had a mothership appearance (32 miles north of Roswell). The storm behind the mothership supercell formed a wall cloud. We watched both of these storms for an hour or so and then headed towards Roswell, NM. We stopped around 7:40 pm MDT in Roswell to watch these storms into the night. We had dinner at Whataburger and arrived at our hotel in Roswell, NM around 9:45 pm MDT.    

 

 *Photo from Molly Matott*