Saturday, June 13, 2009 — TX Panhandle

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Basically a huge waste of time and gas money here. Vivek, Bryan and I were suckered out into the Panhandle by tasty-looking parameters, albeit with questionable upper-level support. Of course, as with darn near every day in 2009, we'll never know if the CAPE-shear parameter space was supportive of anything interesting because the atmosphere had already vomited out about half a million storms across the Panhandle by 4pm. We started out in Shamrock, and spent the better part of the afternoon in a cat-and-mouse chase pursuing whichever cell came closest to passing for discrete and rotating at the time. That led us all the way down to Paducah initially, then over to Matador, and finally NW to Silverton. At Silverton, we at least encountered a rotating wall cloud right in town that was impressive enough to warrant activating the sirens. Our arrival prompted a decline in storm organization rather quickly, though, and that was that. We started making our way back to I-40; radar showed a few interesting cells remaining along and N of the interstate, but they each weakened and eventually dissipated before sunset. We grabbed dinner and Shamrock and made it home sometime around midnight.