June 11, 2024 Las Vegas, New Mexico Area Chase
by John Farley
I was busy for much of the day, but was hoping to get away in the late afternoon for a local chase somewhere within an hour or so of Santa Fe. Most of north central, northeastern, and east central NM was in a marginal risk for severe weather per SPC. This made sense - wind fields were not particularly strong, but with lots of leftover moisture from widespread storms and rain the past couple days and warmer temperatures than the previous day, there would be potential for strong storms to form over the mountains of northern NM which might then move onto the plains. When I had finished my various tasks around mid-afternoon, I looked at radar. Not too impressive anywhere except well back up in the mountains and too far to get to along I-25 in northeast NM at first. But after a little while, I noticed more storms starting to form around the southern and eastern edges of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and decided to head out around 3 p.m. Drove through scattered storms along I-25 as far as Rowe. A few were to my south and moving away, and not too strong. There was one decent one in the mountains north of Pecos, and I at first considered driving up into the Pecos Canyon for an interecept. But while stopped in Rowe, I looked again at radar and noted that a line of storms just east of Las Vegas, NM had gone SVR-warned. Those storms were perhaps 45 minutes from where I was and not moving very fast, so I decided to make those my target. As I headed that way, a new storm went up at the tail end (SW end) of that line, and by the time I got to the US 84 exit just outside Las Vegas, that storm was clearly stronger than anything to its northeast, although the northeast line of storms was still SVR warned and the new storm was not. So, I decided to go after this new tail-end storm, down 84 to the south-southeast. This was a few minutes after 4 p.m. It looked like the new storm was just east of 84, maybe 10 or 15 miles from where I was, and moving more or less south at 15 mph. Soon, at 4:15, it got a new SVR warning, and then the warning was dropped on the line to its northeast, so going after it was the right choice. A problem with chasing on US 84 in that area is that there are high bluffs along the east side of the road that block much of the view of any storm that is east of the highway. But perhaps 10 miles down, the road temporarily turned farther from the bluffs, and the view of the storm was pretty good. It had occasional lowereed areas along its leading edge, and looked like it had a decent hail core, both visually and on radar. The lowered area at the southwest end of the storm briefly took on the look of a wall cloud:
Much of the time, though, there were multiple lowered areas that looked more outflow-related, as in this picture:
As had been the case with most of the day's storms, this one was backbuilding on its southwest edge, making its movement effectively toward the south, even though the existing areas of precipitation were drifting more to the southeast. It was getting closer to the road, and produced in-cloud and cloud-to-cloud lightning directly overhead and CG strikes within a mile:
Because going farther would have taken me into the storm, and because I had dinenr plans, I called it a chase around 4:40. As I returned to I-25, another strong storm had moved into the area near Rowe, and the area between was gradually filling in. The storms evolved into a large bow-shaped complex southeast, south, and eventually southwest of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. This large complex of storms seem to have all formed on outflow from earlier storms in the mountains, and the one I had been on was probably the strongest and certainly the most isolated. As I was on 25, I noticed that there was quite a bit of CG lightninhg all over the line of storms, but particularly near the storm I had been on. I stopped one last time, and was able to capture this image of lightning and mammatus from the storm, now well to my southeast:
When I crossed through the storms east of Rowe, not far from the Villanueva exit, I encountered heavy rain and some small hail, along with considerable ponding on the road. Later, around 6:15, the general part of the line associated with the storm I had been chasing got one more SVR warning, as a cell ramped up right over I-40. However, that pulse was short-lived, and the storms weakened after that. With these storms, there were reports of small hail east of route 84 in the area I was observing and gusts close to 50 mph later farther south near I-40. However, much of the area impacted by these storms is very thinly populated, so there may well have been larger hail and/or stronger winds that went unreported.
Total chase distance: Approximately 140 miles.
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