July 18, 2024 Las Vegas, New Mexico Storm Chase

by John Farley


I was out the door shortly after 2 p.m., after noticing big storm clouds over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains while running errands in Santa Fe. I was mainly out to shoot lightning, not really expecting severe despite an SPC marginal risk along and east of the mountains. Driving through the Glorieta/Rowe area on I-25, as I got near the original storms I had seen, along the western edge of the stormy area over the mountains, it was evident they were not very strong and had little lightning, particularly CG. But I noticed a SVR warning for a storm north of Las Vegas and east/NE of Mora, moving slowly to the SW. That warning was issued shortly after 2 p.m. Given the storm's movement toward the direction I was coming from, I figured I could get on it if it held together. This storm and another one farther north had initiated over the high plains just east of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, but their southwestward motion was taking them toward the easternmost of the mountains.

I did make a quick stop at a parking area on I-25 not far from San Jose to get my NM Atlas and Gazeteer out and to quickly check data; at that time the SVR warning was still in effect with maybe 10 minutes to go. The warning expired at 3, but the storm still looked good on radar. My first distant views of the storm revealed a hard updraft and a nicely backsheared anvil above the main updraft. Driving again, I did not know that a special weather statement (SPS) was issued around the time the warning expired, for 50 mph wind and penny sized hail. By around 3:15, I had a good view of the storm once I was in the Las Vegas area, and I continued to the first exit after Las Vegas (the northern airport exit) and stopped there to watch the storm.

The storm had nice structure, though at this time not really a wall cloud, but it seemed to be marginally supercellular as it was a single cell, intense, and a right mover, being driven to the SW or SSW by its updraft on the SW edge of the storm in the presence of weak steering flow to the SE or SSE. I took quite a few pictures, including these two:

You can see in this one that the core was pretty compact and pretty intense, despite the lack of a wall cloud at this time. As the storm got closer, some condensation began to form very low to the ground along the leading edge, under what appeared to be a strong updraft in the storm above:

After taking these pictures and a few others, I switched to lightning photography with the lightning trigger. There was not a lot of CG lightning, but it had the look of a storm that could produce some, so I tried. Fairly soon, there was a bright flash - just out of my frame, to the east or southeast of the core, and closer to me than the core was. Then, in the next 2 minutes, two more, but both very close (well under a mile) and behind me as I looked to the west/NW. I thought they were too close to continue shooting with the car window open, so I dropped back to Las Vegas. There were no more of these near I-25, but now, over the mountains not far NW of Las Vegas, the storm quickly produced an impressive wall cloud shortly before 4 p.m.(probably around 3:45 or 3:50), and lightning soon began to zap down near it. At first I parked near a small pond or lake I had noticed, but the view was not as open there as I thought it would be. Here is my first picture of the wall cloud, which I got from that location:

I moved up the road (the frontage road to I-25 north of the northernmost Las Vegas exit) for a more open view, and there I was going back and forth between photographing the wall cloud and trying to use the lightning trigger, and did not do the latter well, messing up nearly every way I could on the lightning. But I did get some nice pictures of the wall cloud:

I like this picture because, being a little less zoomed, it shows the larger structure of the storm, which at this point was definitely looking supercellular. This was the lowest the wall cloud got, but a few minutes later it still looked pretty good:

As I said, most of my attempts at lightning photography were unsuccessful, but I did get one:

The sequence of events was interesting. First the wall cloud, then several flashes of lightning from it and near it, then a few minutes later a big increase in radar reflectivity. Then, after a few more minutes, a new SVR warning issued at 4:03 p.m. So once again, a surge in lightning from/near a wall cloud was a sign of the storm ramping up, something I have seen a number of times before.

I continued to watch the storm until it was about due west of Las Vegas, finally capturing one good lightinig picture. But if the storm held together, it would eventually cross my route back to Santa Fe on I-25, so I needed to be ahead of it before I did. So I headed back on I-25, stopping to take pictures of the storm a couple times along the part of I-25 that goes SSW from Las Vegas before turning west. The storm was still SVR-warned and still looked it, but was becoming a bit more linear and outflow dominant. I got some more pictures, but did not linger too long at either stop (the gas station where US 84 intersects 25, and one or two exits toward Santa Fe from there), because I was directly in the path of the storm. Here is a picture from the first of those two stops, the gas station at 84 and I-25:

Eventually I left the storm, wanting to get back to Santa Fe in time for dinner, but noticed on radar that a fairly strong storm was now farther west down the broken line of storms that had formed westward from the original cell. Driving between the US 84 exit and Rowe, I encountered strong bursts of outflow wind ahead of the precipitation, probably some gusts of 40 mph or more. As I neared Glorieta, I could see ahead of me an updraft base, with a small shelf cloud on the leading edge (suggesting it was on the outflow boundary) and some rain shafts starting to come out of the cloud base. Both on radar and visually, this intensified dramatically as I got near it, but since it did not have a SVR warning, I decided that any hail would not be large enough to ause damage to my car, so I kept going. Again, driving, what I did not know was that a SPS was issued at 5:16 p.m. for this storm for 50 mph wind and nickel sized hail. And as it turns out, the hail wasn't that large, but it was intense. A very heavy barrage of mostly pea sized hail and torrential rain enveloped the highway around 5 miles SE of Glorieta, just about at the time the SPS was issued, forcing me and most of the traffic to pull over and wait for the worst of it to pass. Driving, visibility was nearly zero, but part of this was because the sudden and extreme drop in temperature fogged over the windshield. The temperature fell from low 80s in the pre-storm environment to 43 at the peak of the hailstorm, with the freeway largely covered with hail. While stopped, I did manage to get some video. I also called the NWS in ABQ to report the hail. Eventually it lightened up so I started up again, only to encounter another intense barrage of rain and hail - but this time I kept going, slowly, because it was too hard to see if any traffic was coming when I started up from the first time I pulled over. By Glorieta, I was out of the worst of it, and by Santa Fe, the temperature was back in the low 80s. Besides the SPS, this storm also got a flash flood warning, which verified with a foot of water on NM route 50 near Glorieta at 5:45 p.m.

Here is a short video clip of the hail:

As to the earlier storm near Las Vegas that got the SVR warnings, the only hail report I saw was half-inch hail near Buena Vista (southeast of Mora) at 2:50 p.m. However, this storm was over thinly populated areas, and I have no doubt some larger hail fell somewhere but went unreported. There was also flash flooding from this storm on highway 94 near Manuelitas, and 2.35 inches of rain near San Pablo.

Total chase distance: 153 miles.

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