Monday 21st May 2012 - Texas Panhandle

After having to drive to DFW For the Changeover of Guests there was a Slight Risk of Supercells in New Mexico and the Western Texas Panhandle, so we hauled everyone up at 9am for a departure towards Amarillo, we stopped at Vernon for a lunch break and headed onwards up towards our target area. Upon reaching Amarillo at 4-5pm a line of Storms was ongoing in New Mexico, this was organising into an MCS, We were hoping the HRRR Models were right in breaking out a few Cells ahead of that cluster close to Amarillo. At about 5pm two storm cells broke out near Adrian and duked it out for a few hours, each becoming severe and then pulsing down, it was becoming apparant that these two storms were fighting for supremecy. We positioned east to Vega and watched for another hour, the Northern Storm started to become dominant and a pronounced Wall Cloud was now on view in front of us, the Lightning was also increasing, at about 840pm we noticed a lowering which was coned shaped which touched the ground before racing into the Precipitation curtain to the North. With darkness falling we positioned South to get some structure shots and then went west along the Service road alongside I-40. Sporadic hail started to fall before Golf Ball sized hail started hitting our car, at this point my South road option from Adrian was about 1 mile ahead, the road surface by this time was covered in about 1" of Hail, hitting the brakes to turn South the car went skidding along, we managed to turn into the skid doing a full 360 and the car coming to a halt facing southwards along the road we needed (Result) We then drive about 1/2 mile South and were greeted to the most amazing stacked Mesocyclone most of us have ever seen, the structure was incredible, we only had about 15 minutes left on this storm as the MCS From New Mexico was about to slam into our Supercell, as it did so another Storm merged with ours and now 2 Mesocyclones were side by side. We then went east to Hereford and let the now squall line overtake us shooting lightning as it did so. We ended the day at Amarillo and ate at Applebys where we met Paul Knightley and Helen.