Chase Report: 29 Apr, 2009, Part 2: Things that go Bump in the Night

Guthrie, TX
After an exciting day of missing tornadoes, we had basically given up and were heading home from Matador. I notice as the sun is going down that the ugly mess to our south has organized into an interesting looking Hybrid. We get south of the mess near Guthrie, and watch as it produces monster, bowl-shaped wall cloud with some funnels just to our NW. I call wall cloud in to NWS at 9:17 as it goes over city of Guthrie. Bill Tabor is up there, too (didn't know it at the time) and calls in wall cloud- TOR warn issued based on spotter funnel reports and radar rotation.

Two areas of rotation translate east through Guthrie just north of 82 and we move after them. I think the attached pics are from the second rotation (and possibly a third for the last couple). At just before 9:30, we spot a possible tornado coincident with rotational velocity signature on radar. Here is our GPS position:



First decent view of possible tube, 9:30 CDT:



A few minutes later, initial feature center frame, second large lowering close to ground at right of frame:




Zoom in, but low level scud blocking ground view...



Low-light mode finally really brings it out:




Fat funnel continues...




I am about 99% sure it is a tornado on the ground for at least some of this sequence of images. The sequence of pics covers 10 minutes, so it was persistent, and co-located with rotation on radar for the duration. Actually, it continued on, but visually, became difficult to discern. At the time of the last couple of pics, I thought it had disappeared, and I pulled us off of it to go get the next (third?) circulation coming from Guthrie.

This one had been catching our attention from time to time, and when we turned around (position shown in first Delormes image, 9:44 CDT), this is what we saw:




9:49 CDT, funnel under wall cloud near the ground:




It Never got its act together like the first, but may have tornadoed briefly. Funnel got a little bigger and seemed to be scraping the ground a couple of times. As with a lot of night-time footage, without a damage survey, it is really impossible to be certain of things in this case.

TonyC