United States Tornadoes
We’ve been doing a lot of driving for not seeing tornadoes this week, though we have been on some good storms in the meantime. Hoping that the Black Hills produces for us today, and we may even end up in southeastern Montana for tomorrow’s storms.
Yesterday put us on a supercell north of Goodland, KS and up into Nebraska, which looked nice at times but had a high base throughout its life cycle. We got somewhat close to a tornado-warned storm in southern Nebraska after the first storm, but the road network was not favorable and it was after dark, so after some lightning shots we bailed to the north for the night.
Here’s what the first cell looked like at it was dropping 1.75″ hail to the north: Continue reading »
We find ourselves coasting into northwestern Kansas this afternoon. The target’s not that clear today, but we’ll stop for lunch on I-70 and figure out where to go from there.
We are still trying to determine if the image below from yesterday was a tornado or not. This storm was ingesting a ton of dust, and for a minute it looked like the dust was getting pulled into a circulation and up into the updraft base, but even on the video it was hard to tell if there was a distinct circulation within the dust. This shot was taken east of Floydada, TX at 2:29pm CDT facing west:
Today brought a Texas Panhandle chase as we set out from Amarillo and ended up on the storm Floydada. A few tornado reports came out for that storm, but I don’t know if anything we saw was actually a tornado (my first footage was from two minutes before the 6 E Floydada report at 1930z on the SPC page).
What we know we saw was lots and lots of dust, most of which was reddish and was getting either pulled into the storm or pushed out along the outflow boundary. It was quite the scene, with several gustnadoes also making an appearance along with a few choice CG bolts close to the area of interest at the base.
Here is what appeared to be a wall cloud from that storm, though it showed no rotation:
Satellite image from May 22nd at 6:15 ET showing the supercell thunderstorm that the Joplin tornado formed from. (NASA)
On May 22, 2011 the city of Joplin, Missouri was impacted by an EF-5 tornado. There were 158 deaths with over a thousand injured as a result of the tornado.
At its peak it was up to a mile wide with winds in excess of 200 miles per hour. The tornado was on the ground for 22.1 miles and lasted an estimated 38 minutes from start to finish. Around 7,000 homes were destroyed, not including any businesses or public buildings.
The gang will be driving up to the Texas Caprock today in preparation for Thursday’s setup. There is a slight chance that a storm or two may go up today as well, so we’ll be keeping an eye on it just in case. Moisture will be the main thing to watch for any potential for today, but tomorrow looks like a decent/good Caprock setup.
Here’s a still from my GoPro with James (left) and Ian (right) taking pictures of our first tornado of the year:
We started the day not expecting much as far as tornadoes within our target area of central Texas. Persistent overcast and showers in the warm sector pretty much killed any hopes of a tornado as the cold front/cold pool undercutting the storms sealed the deal on not getting any tornadoes. But being on our chasecation, we decided to go for it anyway and got on one of the best storms in the area, though I personally didn’t get much of anything worth sharing from today.
So instead, we called it quits early and got our hotel for the night. I was able to get my video of the tornado and funnel cloud from the 19th edited and uploaded: Continue reading »
We are targeting southern Oklahoma today for what might be our third tornado day in a row. It is quite the feat to get tornadoes three days in a row, so we are keeping expectations low but still hoping for the best. Yesterday we ended up catching a funnel cloud that was on a separate storm (seen below) from the tornado that I posted a picture of earlier.
Ian posted a number of pictures from the first two days to the Capital Weather Gang.
Here’s some more images from our first two chase days from Ian and James:
5/18:
We have spent the first two days of our chase trip nabbing tornadoes in Kansas. The storm on the 18th produced two or three tornadoes that we watched develop, mature and dissipate. Day two of our chasecation brought a brief needle tornado near South Haven, Kansas. Below are some screen grabs from the video I took (I have hours of footage from the 18th to go through). I will post some stuff from Ian and possibly James later on.
5/18:
More below the page break! Continue reading »
Ian, James Hyde and I made the overnight trip from Maryland into Kansas! After a long night with little sleep, we just just finished up some breakfast in Topeka and are going to drop southwest to somewhere in the Dodge City/Great Bend/Pratt region to wait for storms to develop.
Things are looking fairly promising today, and we hope to catch our first tornado of the year on the first day! Plans beyond today aren’t 100% certain at this point, but we have a general idea of how we want to play the setups for tomorrow and Monday.
Right now, you can follow us on Spotter Network under my name (Mark Ellinwood), though we may change that up later to include everyone’s name.
Here’s our personal Twitter accounts if you wish to follow along:
Mark Ellinwood – @MADUSWX
Ian Livingston – @islivingston
James Hyde – @wxmeddler
NOTE: This is the last Tornado Threat Forecast for three weeks as I head out with Ian and a new-to-the-Plains chaser JT. I might end up doing a daily blog thing on this site as I have done on my personal site for the past two chasecations. We’ll see.
Just doing the risks and potential today… gotta finish some packing and prep for the chasecation. See you all out west!
1-3 DAY
Thursday
Central High Plains — POTENTIAL: Very Low — CONFIDENCE: Normal
Northern Louisiana — POTENTIAL: Low — CONFIDENCE: Normal
Friday
Northern Plains — POTENTIAL: Low — CONFIDENCE: Normal Continue reading »
More U.S. Tornadoes
