04/04/10 DISC: MO

[Larry J. Kosch]

Thought I would open a DISC thread about the storm activities that occurred in MO today. There were a number of thunderstorm warnings beginning north of Kansas City and the storms moved eastward. At one point, NEXRAD radar showed a storm cell with TVS near Carrollton MO. Don't know if there were any reported tornado touchdowns or not.

I watched the video streaming on tornadovideos.net. I caught the tail end of a accident scene being shown by a chase vehicle associated with Intercept Images. The video stream showed a white pickup/SRV that apparently slid on a rain slick road and flipped over in a shallow ravine. Hope no one was hurt in that accident! Does anyone have any information on that situation?

 

[Adam Lucio]

This probably belongs in a DISC thread as opposed to a reports thread but anyways I emailed EAX my chase log and they have an interesting theory on the events, one I never really thought of myself.

Hello Adam,



Thank you for providing the video clip of chase on 4/4/2010. The clip on your blog provides a little more clarity to situation. There definitely appears to be a funnel cloud and I can detect the RFD, but it’s inconclusive visually as to whether a tornado formed given the wet nature of the RFD. From the original video you sent, by unanimous agreement we could see a funnel, but there appeared another feature that wasn’t connected to funnel, but an entity unto itself. To me, it appeared to be an ascending landspout that did not quite connect to the cloud base. The landspout appeared to develop on the southern flank of the mesocyclone induced funnel. We were speculating as to whether the RFD played a role in the landspout formation under one of the towers flanking the main updraft. So, in a sense, there probably was a weak tornado, but not one associated with the supercell, but with one of the flanking storms.



Thank you for your on-the-spot information, we very much value having a ground-truth perspective of the storms for which we warn.