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20th Anniversary of 4/18-20/1996 Tornado Outbreak (IL, MO, KY, IN, Ontario)


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WAND-17 Decatur, IL's lead story on its 6PM news was the 20th anniversary of the Apr. 18-19 back-to-back tornadoes which hit the city, starting with the initial F1 20 years ago tonight.

Compilation of WAND news coverage on the Decatur tornadoes:

 

http://www.wandtv.com/category/182814/video?clipId=12371130&autostart=true

 

Wikipedia article (FWIW) on the April 1996 outbreak with lots of links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_1996_tornado_outbreak_sequence

 

PDS Tornado Watch #190 (4/19/96): http://www.convectiveoutlook.com/highrisk/19801999/960419_tor190.htm

 

Video of the Urbana, IL tornado which continued into Ogden:

 

 

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This one was pretty impressive in terms of numbers. Not sure if it still holds the record for Illinois or if something has passed it since then. There were something like 69 tornadoes in the subforum area with over 50 of those occurring in Illinois and Indiana.

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I created an animation of the storm that rolled through our county 20 years ago.

 

I had made a lengthy post previously here or the old western forum, search won't go back farther than a year. This storm did damage in other Indiana counties, and there were injuries in ours (Johnson). A barber shop, domino's pizza and Hampton's Market were destroyed.  

 

Newspaper from that day: 

https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/156806525/

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I created an animation of the storm that rolled through our county 20 years ago.

 

I had made a lengthy post previously here or the old western forum, search won't go back farther than a year. This storm did damage in other Indiana counties, and there were injuries in ours (Johnson). A barber shop, domino's pizza and Hampton's Market were destroyed.  

 

Newspaper from that day: 

https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/156806525/

Wow, that's crazy how discrete and long-lived the supercell was

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I was nine and saw my first tornado. My parents were on I-72 west of Decatur with a flat tire. My pops ended up driving on it until we were able to get north. Also was able to see a funnel the day before, don't remember too much about it other than the fact I saw a concrete gas station garbage can flipping end over end down the street. Really the event that sparked a young interest in weather.

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23z-01z.

aT4EtLo.gif

01z-03z.

GfwZa7P.gif

Incredible radar loops. Thanks for sharing them. Tsnow12 did an excellent talk on this event at COD a few years ago, titled something like 'April 19, 1996: When the Dryline Came to Illinois'

Regarding the soundings Hoosier posted, the directional shear was excellent, but had the low level speed shear been stronger resulting in higher 0-1/0-3 SRH, there easily could have been multiple violent tornadoes. This was something pointed out in the COD talk.

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Regarding the soundings Hoosier posted, the directional shear was excellent, but had the low level speed shear been stronger resulting in higher 0-1/0-3 SRH, there easily could have been multiple violent tornadoes. This was something pointed out in the COD talk.

 

Considering where some of these supercells tracked, that would've likely been a catastrophe.

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