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Severe weather: 5/10-5/12 Plains/Midwest


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Good lord, that thing was a giant cluster&!#$. Big ole HP mess that storm was. Impossible to see hardly anything. Got a few glimpses of the edge of the wedge, but it was mostly a rain-wrapped. Also managed to see more "chase teams" (not tours) with decals, lightbars and antennas than I have in the past 5 years combined. It's getting insane out there.

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Well I could be wrong on this idea, but since most of the storm was actually on the cold side of the boundary (with northerly winds to the north of it) aside from the inflow region, since the RFD was being sourced from the colder air on that side of the boundary, instead of spurring on long-lived tornadoes, the relatively colder (and thus heavier/denser) air in the RFD (as compared to a storm further south) may have made it more effective at leading to occlusion/cutting off of the low level circulation/inflow. Again, this explanation might not be correct (feel free to correct me if it is), as my knowledge of these processes still needs some work, but the northerly winds north of the warm front intrigued me in this case.

 

Obviously, the fact that it was relatively HP from the start had a say in this as well.

 

Also there is a report of a house destroyed to the basement/foundation earlier near Sutton from the first large tornado that cell produced.

 

Sounds like a good reason to me. I'm pretty sure I've read a paper stating that the closer in character that the RFD is to the inflow air (similar temps and dewpoints), the more favorable it is for stronger and longer lived tornadoes. I'll have to see if I can dig that one back out/find it again.

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Good lord, that thing was a giant cluster&!#$. Big ole HP mess that storm was. Impossible to see hardly anything. Got a few glimpses of the edge of the wedge, but it was mostly a rain-wrapped. Also managed to see more "chase teams" (not tours) with decals, lightbars and antennas than I have in the past 5 years combined. It's getting insane out there.

I always kind of knew it was getting ridiculous with all the chasers and chase teams but it never truly hot home until getting stuck in the 3-mile long chaser traffic jam with a tornado bearing down near Kingfisher, OK on 5/19/2010. All sorts of "chase teams" drove on the shoulders and in the wrong lanes, nearly causing accidents.

Now I'm extremely cognizant of the chaser hordes and especially chase teams with logos and light bars and sometimes try to steer clear of the mess and go for "lesser" structure storms.

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Two tornado warnings in KS now with the semi discrete supercells there, although I find it kind of funny those went tornado warned as soon as they entered ICT's CWA and their signatures don't look quite as good as some of the supercells earlier in DDC's CWA.

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Well I could be wrong on this idea, but since most of the storm was actually on the cold side of the boundary (with northerly winds to the north of it) aside from the inflow region, since the RFD was being sourced from the colder air on that side of the boundary, instead of spurring on long-lived tornadoes, the relatively colder (and thus heavier/denser) air in the RFD (as compared to a storm further south) may have made it more effective at leading to occlusion/cutting off of the low level circulation/inflow. Again, this explanation might not be correct (feel free to correct me if it is), as my knowledge of these processes still needs some work, but the northerly winds north of the warm front intrigued me in this case.

 

Obviously, the fact that it was relatively HP from the start had a say in this as well.

 

Also there is a report of a house destroyed to the basement/foundation earlier near Sutton from the first large tornado that cell produced.

 

 

I agree with this. The S NE supercell leaned on the outflow-dominant/HP side of the supercell spectrum all day. This is my first time using a high-res radar to track the storms, and it definitely seemed that in the beginning a lot of the RFD's were divergent in nature... an indicator that the RFD air was of low theta-e.

 

Further east as the supercell separated itself a bit more from the cold air and hit a lower LCL environment, the rotational couplets tightened and we saw the potential of the environment be realized. Most of these tornadoes however were short-lived because the RFD continued to surge outward with every cycle before a new couplet formed on the inflow/RFD shear axis. Pretty classic Plains cyclic supercell behavior.

 

Overall though, none of this was unexpected. Additionally the HRRR was outstanding. For many of its runs it had a monster supercell going through SE NE before lining out near Omaha around 0Z. Which is what exactly happened. Absolutely spot-on.

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THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN WICHITA HAS ISSUED A

* TORNADO WARNING FOR...
  MCPHERSON COUNTY IN CENTRAL KANSAS...

* UNTIL 1030 PM CDT

* AT 956 PM CDT...A CONFIRMED TORNADO WAS LOCATED NEAR MCPHERSON... 
AND MOVING NORTHEAST AT 30 MPH. THIS WARNING REPLACES THE PREVIOUS
TORNADO WARNING FOR MCPHERSON COUNTY.

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It looked quite strong for a scan. I stopped in Stuart, IA for the night which is just south of that circulation.

 

I believe it's actually the same updraft that was in the big cyclic HP in NE earlier.

 

Also that more isolated cell SE of Omaha with the severe warning has quite the meso.

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Yeah the FD reported a tornado 1 mile SE of the city. 

 parents are safe, but there is a refinery there and my dads church then walmart  (places from sw to ne along that path where it went)

 

 

looks like there were 3 seperate reports of the tornado

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