Bill Reid Art
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Adrian Mothership
Artist: Bill Reid
Spaceship supercell and lightning at Adrian, Texas, on May 21, 2012. Our Tempest Tours chase group was watching some marginally severe storms in the wilds of eastern New Mexico on this afternoon, with perhaps a brief and distant tornado to brag about, too. Near Tucumcari, along I-40, things had wound down quite a bit and I was not sure of the next move. Radar then showed a new storm developing in the northwestern Texas Panhandle, about an hour away to our ENE. I elected to try to intercept that storm before sunset, which was maybe 90 minutes away. Two things worked perfectly in our favor. Interstate 40 provided a very fast route exactly to where we needed to go: to the east! The storm, instead of drifting away from us and off to the east on the upper winds, started to spin hard and moved to the SSE, towards the small town of Adrian along Interstate 40. As we entered Texas, we could see a fabulous-looking storm base. Now the question was, could we get to Adrian before the storm, and before the large hail?! We managed to do that with a few minutes to spare, and dropped south of Adrian a few miles. To our north was this magnificent "Mothership" supercell updraft. A thick swath of precipitation spilled out of the middle of the updraft base, and hid a tornado from our vantage point. The lightning was frequent in the forward-flank precipitation area on the east and northeast sides of the updraft base, or to the right in the image. This was a very lucky shot with the wide-angle lens as the lightning occurred just as I clicked the camera shutter.
From Storms
