The upper wind fields were not very strong, but that much low-level helicity with a CAPE around or above 2500 j/kg was pretty encouraging. Not all models had good low-level helicity - they all had ESE winds at the surface and southwesterly winds higher up in that area, but some had the best turning higher above the ground, which would still yield supercells but with a lesser chance of tornadoes. Also, not all models had CAPE as high as the NAM, but most had it in the 1700 to 2500+ range, so I was pretty encouraged, even though the SPC only had the area in a marginal risk. (Strangely, they did not change that even after a severe thunderstorm watch was issued.) Most forecast models, including the majority of CAMs, showed strong storms in the afternoon in my general area of interest, although as always there was some disagreement on exactly where. But a general target along US 285 in the aforementioned area was pretty much good for any of the model forecasts. There was a little more disagreement among the models on how early the storms would initiate - around or after 2 p.m. on most models, but as early as 1 p.m. on one or two models and as later as 3 p.m. or later on others. It has been my experience that storms often initiate earlier than the models predict in New Mexico, so I wanted to be in the Clines Corners area by 1 p.m.
I left Santa Fe a little before noon. As I got out of town and headed down 285 toward Clines Corners, I saw an area of agitated cumulus, then TCU, and by 12:40 or so, the first storm had begun. This would become my target storm for the day. It was already looking pretty good off in the distance to my SW when I stopped at Clines Corners a little before 1 p.m. After a quick pit stop and carry-out lunch pruchase and a radar check in Clines Corners, it was evident that I needed to go to Encino and then west. The storm was south of Willard, and not moving a lot. Per the model forecasts, I expected it to move northeast toward Clines Corners, but I would have plenty of time for an initial intercept somewhere east of Willard then could adjust as necessary. So I headed down to Encino on 285 then turned west toward Willard on US 60. The storm had a nice, hard updraft base and a heavy core just north of the updraft, but no wall cloud yet. There are a lot of wind farms between Encino and Willard along 60, which offered a nice foreground for photographing the storm. After a while, maybe around 1:30 p.m., the first of what would be many wall clouds through the course of the afternoon appeared:
Around this time, a special weather statement was issued for the storm, indicating the possibility of 50 mph wind and nickle-sized hail. The movement was reported as northeast at 10. By now though, it was becoming evidentr that the storm was not moving very much - probably not even that much. So I decided to edge a little closer, but with the rain and probably hail north of the updraft, I did not want to go too far west, both to avoid getting into the precipitation and also to keep it from blocking my view of the updraft area. About 20-30 minutes after the picture above was taken, something began rising from the ground under or ahead of the main updraft. At first, I thought it was blowing dust, perhaps from RFD, but it soon became evident that it was condensation. Here is a picture:
This is speculation, because I was too far away to tell, but perhaps the combination of inflow and outflow was lofting hail fog in the air. Whatever was going on, it happened repeatedly throughout the life of the storm, often when the storm was cycling up. That was the case this time. When this began, there was no wall cloud, but one formed shortly later. And, around the time the condensation rising from the ground started, at 207 p.m. the storm got the first of the four SVR warnings it would eventually get. This warning correctly described the storm as nearly stationary near Willard. Here is a picture from a little later, once the wall cloud had formed:
The condensation near the ground moved in different directions at different times, and it appeared at times that part of it was moving toward the core and part of it away from the core. So definitely some variation in the wind direction under there. A while after the wall cloud formed, it tightened up and and produced a funnel cloud, the first of several I saw. Here are a couple video captures:
This funnel, like all that I saw with this storm, did not last long. Soon after the wall cloud tightened up and produced the funnel, the funnel dissipated, and after a while the broader lowering and the condensation rising from the ground disappeared for a time, too. Around the time I got these pictures, the WEA alarm on my phone blared. The SVR warning had been upgraded at 2:24 p.m. to DESTRUCTIVE, with radar indicating baseball sized hail, possibly driven by 60 mph wind. A "tornado possible" tag was also added to the warning at this time. I heard more thunder overhead, along with flickers of lightning in the clouds. Looking up, I was startled to see quite an impressive display of mammatus overhead and just to my north:
Mammatus would persist for pretty much the rest of the time I was on the storm, and gradually the storm became more electrified. Soon the storm cycled, and new lowerings appeared in the updraft, culminating in this, another of the several transient funnels I saw:
The funnel is partly hiden by the new batch of condensation/scud rising from the ground, but the long narrow funnel extending down from the cloud base is pretty clearly there. However, as I said it was transient, as were all of the funnels I observed. Although several appeared to extend halfway down or more, none of them lasted for more than a few minutes, some less, and I could not see anything to make me think any of them were down - though admittedly I was far enough away that I might not have been able to tell even if they were down. But nobody closer reported any tornadoes, so I do not think it is particularly likely that any of them were down. With the good contrast, though, this and the others later made an impressive sight.
After a while, while the storm was again cycling, I decided to try to get a bit south because the precipitation was beginning to obscure my view of the updraft area. Back toward Encino a few miles, I fouind a N-S gravel road that appeared to serve the wind farms, so I went a couple miles south on it in hope of a better view. There, I saw this, as condensation formed right along the edge of the core and was drawn back up into the updraft:
I can't say for sure, but I do not think there was a funnel or tornado here, just condensation/scud that formed along the edge of the core being pulled back up into the updraft. This was around the beginning of a period of about an hour and 40 minutes in which large and accumulating hail was reported at a location southeast of Willard. The hail there was as large as 2 inches and accumulated to six inches deep. After taking this picture I moved back and forth a bit, trying to find a location where I would have a view less blocked by the rain. The storm never moved very much over its eventual six-hour life, but it would shift a little north when it entered a weakening phase of its cycling, then surge a bit south or southeast when it cycled up the next time. The net effect from about 2 to 4 p.m. was to shift the storm slightly to the southeast, away from Willard, but not much - likely the storm never moved more than 5 or 10 miles from where it was when I first encountered it. Eventually I ended up back on the same north-south road where the picture above was taken, but farther south this time. As far as I could go, it turned out, as a train was stopped blocking a grade crossing where the tracks crossed the road. At the time I thought it was strange for a train to be just stopped blocking the tracks (as it was for the entire time, maybe 20 minutes or so, that I was at that location), but in hindsight I suspect the train had been stopped there to avoid entering the storm. In addition to the deep hail accumulations, there was pretty widespread flooding in the area impacted by the storm, and I think either could have been a problem for a train attempting to cross. So I stopped in a large parking area a short distance from the tracks, and watched and took pictures as the storm cycled up once again. By this time, I had noticed a problem with my video camera (which turns out to have been because I inadvertently changed a setting), and as the storm re-intensified, it also moved a bit to the south due to backbuilding, causing it to be a bit firther away. So I got out a different DSLR than the one I had been using, with more telephoto capacity. As the storm cycled back up, a new batch of condensation/scud rose from near the ground. Then, yet another wall cloud formed, with transient funnels once again:
I thought this could be where I finally would get a picture of a tornado with wind turbines. This ramp-up of the storm seemed a little more intense than the earlier ones, and it is evident in both of the pictures that a bit of an RFD slot was beginning to cut in. But alas, it was not to be. Yet again, the funnels, even the largest, most pronounced one, were quite transient and gone in a few minutes. As the storm once again cycled down, I decided I really needed to get a bit more south. And it was not going to happen on this road, so I ended up doubling back to Encino, dropping south on route 3 to Duran, then taking a west option a couple miles down US 54 (which runs NE and SW) from there. But this "option" turned out to be a rather poor dirt road, so I could not go anywhere I could not get back out of before the road got wet. I drove maybe 5-10 miles west, directly toward the storm, from US 54 on that road. However, it was evident both visually and on radar (which I somehow kept, even down the back road) that the storm was now weakening. At 4:30 another SVR warning, the fourth the storm had had, was issued, but it was already evident to me that the storm was weakening, though I suppose it could still have been severe at that point. A new storm had gone up a little northeast of Encino, so I decided to return there and re-evaluate once I did. By the time I was back there, the SVR warning had been dropped on my storm, but a new one was in effect on the new storm northeast of Encino, which was drifting slowly to the NW. So I decided to continue up route 3 to get closer. Route 3 ends up at I-40 maybe 15 miles east of Clines Corners, so not a big detour, as long as I could stay west of the storm and avoid any hail. By the time I got close, though, this storm was weakening, so I decided to call it a day. Both storms kept going for a while, but it was well over an hour until the new one northeast of Encino would get a new SVR warning as it neared Santa Rosa, by which time I was back in Santa Fe or very close after another stop for takeout food at Clines Corners.
The storm I mainly chased, near Willard, received a total of four severe thunderstorm warnings and two flash flood warnings, which more than verified. Flooding and hail accumulations closed 35 miles of NM route 42 southeast of Willard, and around 30 vehicles were trapped by flooding and accumulated hail, with a couple washed off the road. As noted, hail sizes of up to 2 inches were reported, although given the thin population of the area, there could have been some even bigger that went unreported. The cars that were trapped had to wait 3 hours for a snowplow to come and get them out. Another road, likely the one that was blocked by the train but much farther south and a bit west, was also closed due to flooding and hail accumulations. A big factor in both the deep hail accumulations and the flooding (with media reports of 6 to 8 inches of rain) was the failure of the storm to move much in its six-hour life. In fact the LSR that reported the 2-inch hail also said that it hailed for an hour and forty minutes at that location. One other thing - through the entire chase I saw maybe 3 other chase vehicles. Most of the time, I had my viewing spot totally to myself. A nice thing about chasing in New Mexico is that this is not unusual. All in all, with the multiple funnels in good contrast, such an intense supercell, and having the storm largely to myself, I would have to say this was my best chase so far in what up to this point had been a rather lackluster season for me.
I suspect the reason this storm did not quite manage to produce a tornado was the relatively weak mid and upper wind fields. There was plenty of low-level directional shear, but as mentioned above, deep-layer shear was weaker because the mid and upper wind fields were not very strong. This is also likely a factor in the relative lack of motion by this storm - its backbuilding was sufficient to offset the relatively weak steering currents, so the storm just stayed put. This was a very active weather day in New Mexico. The road closures caused by this storm were just a couple of the many roads and highways closed this day in NM for reasons ranging from flooding to pileups due to dust storms to power lines down across the road to mudslides, washouts, and hail accumulations. KOB chief meteorologist Eddie Garcia said that night on the 10 p.m. news that it was his busiest day in ten years. And most of the storms were like this one - little or no movement, or slow movement at the most. Another storm farther south helped to quell the destructive fires near Ruidoso, yet at the same time caused major problems due to flash flooding including a 6 foot rise in 15 minutes on the Rio Ruidoso downstream from Ruidoso toward Roswell. Other storms during the day and overnight caused major problems near Watrous and between Espanola and Abiquiu. One storm that was the exception to the slow movement was one that formed near the storm I was on very early on, near initation around 12:30. That storm raced northward at 45 mph through Edgewood, Madrid, Cerillos, and I-25 between Santa Fe and Bernalillo, all of which were impacted by various combinations of high wind and large hail.. It caused a dust storm that triggered a massive pileup with 18 injuries on I-25 near Algodones and a 70 mph gust at La Bajada, a few miles southwest of Santa Fe, which this storm narrowly missed. It then continued on to produce more high wind in Los Alamos and Espanola. I am not sure, but I think this storm may have been a left split from the storm I chased, given its highly deviant leftward movement relative to all of the other storms, and the fact that it started very close to the storm I was on, right around the time the storms first initiated. Unlike my storm and most of the others, this storm seemed to be a somewhat larger and less organized-looking on radar, a cluster of storms in contrast to the isolated supercells that most of the other storms were.
Interestingly, when SPC first put out a mesoscale discussion for NM around 2 p.m., a watch was considered unlikely. But a little over an hour later, they thought better of it and issued a severe thunderstorm watch for most of NM near and just east of the central mountains, and a small part of west Texas also. This watch verified well, with lots of severe reports up and down the central part of the state from the various storms.
It is not too often that a storm I chase makes the national news, but this one did. A trucker who was stuck in the mess on route 42 had a drone, and sent it up for some pictures. Those are included in this AP story on this storm and others in Minnesota that day:
AP article with photos of vehicles caught in hail and flooding along Highway 42 outh of Willard
I also found this video on X of vehicles stuck in the hail and flooding on route 42. I think it is the best I have seen so far. Watch it full screen if you can.
Total chase distance: 252 miles.
