Baseball Hail near the Mexican Border

Chase Recap:

Generally I was antsy to get out chasing and decided “Why not?” on a decent setup during a holiday weekend. Stephen Barabas and I left Norman on Saturday night and headed down to Stephenville, TX.

On Sunday we awoke and headed down towards a target near San Angelo. Into the cell hell we went near Brownwood before emerging and realizing we probably needed to drop south to perhaps Junction, TX on I-10. We briefly started heading west on I-10 before dropping south through what seemed to be a better route on the map. It turned out to be a lengthy route through ranches which required Stephen to get out many times and open up and close gates as we passed through property lines, slowing us down considerably.

By the time we made it down to Rocksprings, we were almost too late for the supercell that had formed southwest of there, and had to haul south and punch through the core. Meanwhile, we had no data, so we were going on very old radar data but came out on the other end and observed a nice wall cloud and got into some hail. We found baseball hail.

Because of the road network, no data and waning sunlight, we were unable to pursue the storm so it was a one and gone look, but it had some nice structure to it.

We played around with some other storms on the way back ending up near Kerrville before deciding to call the chase and getting some food before heading back to Austin for the night.