Our second vantage of the Sterling City tornado mostly was obscured by wrapping rain and hail, though we intermittently could hear its whooshing noise “somewhere in there”. Fortunately, the dense precip curtains thinned just long enough to reveal a fat, truncated condensation funnel with multiple vortices whirling beneath, and surrounded aloft by a very rapidly rotating wall cloud. This wide-angle perspective offers great structural context, with the rear-flank gust front arching out of an unseen triple-point intersection with the forward-flank gust front at distant right, then across the field of view in front of the tornado. A new wall cloud tried to develop at right, but got undercut by the outflow, while the deeply occluded tornadic circulation persisted for several more minutes. The only noteworthy damage in this remote area was rated EF1 at a gas plant, near the end of the tornado’s lifespan. That was about ten minutes after this shot, during a time when it was again densely rain-wrapped and not visible. Given the very intense rotation observed with eyeballs, and aloft on radar, it probably was capable of much stronger damage when it was hitting nothing but mesquite bushes, sagebrush and jackrabbits.
9 NNW Sterling City TX (17 May 21) Looking NW
31.9620, -101.0316