This had been a difficult storm intercept day: watching a couple of promising looking supercells die, dodging an extremely intense bow echo, and getting caught in a separate, nasty core of heavy rain, hail and damaging wind that made us feel as if we were stuck in front of a giant fire hose. We let the “fire hose” pass over both us and the nearby town of Mineral Wells, then on a whim and a hunch with the hope of some clearing skies, zoomed up the hill west of town to catch the last colors of sunset. Before us, and west of the outflow from the “fire hose” storm, emerged a solitary supercell, the updraft spinning itself out at lower right, the anvil spreading a glorious field of mammatus overhead. At first, I was perturbed that the prior low cloud cover had forced us to miss the brightest colors. Not for long…these rich dark tones of chocolate and purple lent an unusual character to the mammatus, while the last of the direct rays still lit the far reaches of the supercell. This experience was well worth every frantic, futile and frustrating moment of the day.
3 W Mineral Wells TX (1 Jun 4) Looking W
32.8019, -98.1752