Morton
a chasing tale
A tremendous, eerie ghost of a storm cowled in a shroud of rust and amber; a cathedral of dust and forked fury.
where:
Morton, TX
when:
May 23rd 2022
synoptics
The Morton day was a strange one; a standout storm in a lacklustre season.
Starting out as a slight risk with only a 2% chance of a tornado, we aren't expecting much, especially given the previous three days of disappointing activity. However, a cluster of strong thunderstorms moving southwest out of New Mexico hits an obscurely oriented outflow boundary heading north west out of the Permian Basin. This clips the southernmost storm in that cluster, sending it supercellular.
This supercell intensifies, becomes cyclic, and proceeds to crawl south east across the Plains toward the city of Morton, in west central Texas.
chase
After a depressingly slow start to a tour which saw us on the road for long distances with little to show for our efforts, this was a day we definitely needed.
Following a McDonald’s lunch north of Snyder, we wait patiently in a local recreation area, unsuccessfully dropping Mentos into bottles of Coke and watching the expectant explosion of fizz fail dramatically and puddle into the dry earth.
Dust devils danced in the heat of the afternoon sun, our expectations buoyed by the robust updrafts we observe building across the border.
As we wait, the spilled Coke rapidly evaporating in the heat, I spend time shooting some b-roll footage of our location. Lying solemnly against a backdrop of rusting grain silos and weather worn concrete, long disused railway tracks run through a sea of overgrown tall grasses bleached by the sun and swaying morosely between the sleepers. Again I’m struck by this juxtaposition of abandoned industry, casually forgotten and sat immediately beside this pristine recreation area. There seems to be no boundary or delineation to demark the two save for one has areas of manicured lawn and the other recedes into the weeds. It's not like they’re short of land in this part of the world so why build the park here? Though clean, maintained and appearing relatively new, it feels like the only visitors besides us are the dust and desolation of the Great Plains.
It's not long before the chase is on.
We first encounter the cluster shortly after it crosses the NM / TX border, and we complete almost a full lap of the coagulating mass as the cluster continues to congeal. The late afternoon sun renders the sky in an assortment of eerie, promising hues whilst heavy rain cores betray the location of the strongest updrafts.
The shroud of red dust that would come to define this chase day begins to smother the landscape as screaming inflow winds drag in clouds of west Texas dirt, concealing each and every storm base and whatever deadly arsenal twists beneath.
Guided by doppler radar, we approach what would become known as the Morton supercell; currently a watercolour smudge across the sky that dominates the horizon.
Already the day feels different.
Mammatus can be seen towering above, arching above the obscuring clouds of Texas farmland like a wildfire billowing smoke. As we drive south to parallel the storm along its eastern flank, the dusty haze diminishes slightly to reveal the faint but distinct defined edges of the storm as it draws closer.
As we continue to head west, the forward flank core slowly but gradually washes away to the east to unveil a completely unexpected but stunningly structured supercell. Beneath its heavily striated base, wrapping great wreaths of dust about itself, is the unmistakable silhouette of a wedge tornado.
The sight brings a simultaneous rush of awe, relief, excitement. At last we have a supercell to chase and it's a stunner.
We pull over to the roadside to take photos and absorb the grandeur, our legs stung with dirt whipped up by surges of warm inflow ripping into the storm. Lightning streaks through the anvil canopy overhead before savagely stabbing at the ground in forks of bright fury. It blinds like a flash bang and there’s a brief but interminable pause, like suspended animation, before a shotgun blast reverberates across the Plains. The sound of thunder is fantastic; cracking through the air like a rock fall and peeling off in waves.
The base and lower regions of the supercell resemble weathered sandstone as laminar striations carved by the atmosphere form the familiar twist of a barberpole. The upper regions are a chaos of mid level inflow; streams of cloud swirling uninhibited into the updraft like an inland hurricane.
I’m in my element as I shoot off a ton of timelapse, the storm crawling at a glacial pace, unobscured, across endlessly flat fields of golden wheat.
We creep in further to investigate, the sky becoming ever darker, attempting to venture beyond and peer behind the curtains of dust that the storm has wrapped around itself.
Edging down one dirt road, the maelstrom swirling above us, the dust parts momentarily to reveal a glimpse of a dissipating wedge tornado swirling out into filaments of suspended earth.
Enticed and with the bit now firmly between our teeth, we manoeuvre around the storm for a better view. Now thoroughly entrenched in the belly of the beast, the extent of the dark heaving mass above us betrayed only by the streak of a blood red horizon, we pause at a crossroads. To our north, barely a quarter of a mile away through a soily soup of rust, the indistinct blur of another tornado planted firmly on the ground can faintly be seen. The verticality of its silhouette punctuated with flourishes of flung out dirt betray its presence as the torrential sound of rushing water grows louder.
“We’re chasing a tornado and we can’t see it” whispers Dave impishly.
Immediately ahead of us to our west a large isolated cloud of dust begins to flare up, an ominous black silhouette standing tall against the horizon. Distinct but weak, the southern flank of this ground swirl snakes and twirls ever higher into the air as this plume grows slowly but steadily closer.
In our hubris we think nothing of it; casually dismissing it as a harmless spin up from the storm’s outflow. Though increasingly prominent, it remains unremarkable.
“Heh, what’s this then?” remarks Dave insouciantly, gesturing to the audacity of this pillar of dirt.
From his driver’s seating position however, the danger can’t be seen.
Dismissively, we make a slow left at the crossroads, facing south now as we wait briefly to ponder our next move. Looking upwards from my rear passenger seat window, I see it. Pendulant above the innocuous swirl of dust is the unmistakable corkscrew of a satellite tornado piercing down like an enormous stalactite from the meso above. Startled, mesmerised for a brief moment, the tornado barely 50 yards from us, I yell: “Shit! Go… GO!!!!” Immediately Dave floors it and we’re out of there with our own trail of dust in our wake. Ahead of us sits a Toyota Prius - the most unlikely of storm chasing vehicles - and this strange, odd juxtaposition replaces my adrenaline rush with bemusement.
Out of danger, the storm weakening and beginning its upscale transformation, we assess our next move and head south east to Levelland. The Morton supercell is now a stacked, multi-tiered mothership, lining out against the pastel blue of the twilight. Lightning strikes glow a sinister devilish red through the thick envelope of dust at the surface and as the storm’s increasing mass now obscures what little light remains, its structure is revealed through intercloud shimmers of violet and blue as the strobing increases. An occasional lightning fork pierces down from the anvil, warning us that this now declining supercell still remains severe as it lines out and floods the Plains.
We spend time photographing the lightning before retiring for the evening to a Buffalo Wild Wings where it seems that every other chaser and their mother has had the same idea. It's a great opportunity to catch up with old acquaintances, make new friends and indulge in some guilt-free pigging out after a long, exhilarating day on the road. Here we learn the bittersweet news of the chase we could have had, if only we had been a little more aggressive in our approach. Whereas our vantage point of each successive tornado was obscured by the reams of dust dragged up from the south, had we pushed on at our sight of the first tornado and then approached from the west, we would have had the view of a lifetime. Though I tell myself that the clear, unobstructed view of one magnificent wedge tornado crossing the highway doesn’t compare to actually being right next to 3 of them, albeit with a restricted view, it's still a bittersweet pill to swallow.
In all, the Morton supercell produced 8 documented tornadoes. We saw and experienced 4 of them, 3 at close quarters. Along with some tremendous lightning and fantastic structure, Morton will certainly go down as one of the more memorable chase days, both for what we did have and what we didn’t.
Thanks for reading. Selected images from this tale can be found over in my Storm Chasing 2022 gallery.
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