15 year anniversary of the 3/13/90 tornado outbreak!

Craig Maire II

Today marks the 15 year anniversary of a large and violent tornado outbreak that struck the plains/midwest, there were a number of F4/F5 tornados on this date as well as a couple fatalities and over 542 million dollars in damage done!. This was very early in the year for such a large outbreak to occur especially for Nebraska, Iowa, etc.! Just, wondering if anyone has anything to add about this extraordinary severe weather event??
 
My first tornado was 3/13/90, the F3 tornado that started near Lowell, NE and moved through Buffalo and Hall counties. I remember being 8 years old and sitting in my living room watching that monster descend and grow in size, and wondering what was going to happen to the town of Lowell. I also remember my mom coming home and screaming at us because we had been watching the storm and taken shelter when the wall cloud went right over our house instead of getting ready for an elementary school recital I had to go to that night :lol: She had NO idea what had happened!
 
I recently talked with the man who was the meteorologist-in-charge at NWS Wichita on that day and he gave me a few insights into the days events.

Believe it or not, the Hesston/Goessel storm initiated fairly early in the outbreak across the southern Plains. Though that particular storm produced consectutive F5s, the real "outbreak" began a bit later when other storms formed in the same general region (and later produced several strong tornadoes) and a few violent tornadoes occurred further north into Nebraska.

He also told me that the damage caused by the Hesston tornado was most intense in the middle of its track, not at the time it destroyed Hesston. "Hedge rows", known by locals to be the hardiest of plants in the region, were completely scoured to the roots.

Gabe
 
This was the day of my first wall cloud sighting. I had just got home from school (I was only 13) and a friend and I were out playing basketball when a storm came up. It rained really hard, then it started hailing. The hail grew to the size of quarters before quiting. Then the wall cloud passed about a mile to my west. This wall cloud eventually dropped multiple tornadoes a few miles northeast of my location and hit Cordova IL. Multiple weak tornadoes passed across the Cordova Nuclear Plant and did some damage there. Pretty scary. Of course since I was so young I had no way of chasing it, so I just watched the wall cloud disappear over the horizon. My friend and I were walking around the neighborhood picking up hailstones trying to find the biggest one.

To this day I've never seen any kind of radar presentation of this storm. If anyone has any information at all, radar data, anything about this storm day, I'd LOVE to see it!!
 
To this day I've never seen any kind of radar presentation of this storm. If anyone has any information at all, radar data, anything about this storm day, I'd LOVE to see it!!
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I worked this event as an intern at the Moline NWS Office. The storm developed just to the south of Moline and intensified rapidly. It was too close to the radar (WSR-74C) to see anything so we went outside (the roof on top of the old terminal building) and saw a rotating wall cloud come over the bluffs to the south of the airport. You could hear the roar. The tornado didn't touch down until it hit the river, then did some damage in LeClaire, another in Port Byron, and another in Cordova. The worst damage was in Cordova, but it was over the Mississippi for quite awhile, thank goodness, so didn't do as much damage as it could have. We received about 10 videos from people taping the tornadoes and large hail. The best was from a college student who was home in Cordova when the tornado hit the town. He ran down in the basement with his family and kept taping. You could hear the hum/roar of the tornado as it approached and the house being damaged above them. Pretty amazing.

Of course with the old 74C radar, there was no way of capturing any of the imagery. But, as it moved away from the radar, we could see an incredible hook that wrapped in on itself moving up the river. One of the Quad City TV stations had a low-power, wide beam 5 cm radar and provided us a videotaped loop. It had a nice hook on their radar, but it got lost quickly as the storm moved away from the radar and the wide beamwidth couldn't resolve it. Another storm developed to the northwest and produced the Worthington IA F4 tornado. It was farther away from the radar but it still showed a nice hook before the tornado touched down.

It was the most exciting day in my young met career up to that time.
 
I am interested in reviewing the details of the 13 March 1990 event. I was wondering if anybody knows of any websites that would have information on the number of touchdowns and their paths. I did a MSN search and also checked the severe events section at SPC but so far I have not been able to find any information.

Thanks
 
To this day I've never seen any kind of radar presentation of this storm. If anyone has any information at all, radar data, anything about this storm day, I'd LOVE to see it!!
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I worked this event as an intern at the Moline NWS Office. The storm developed just to the south of Moline and intensified rapidly. It was too close to the radar (WSR-74C) to see anything so we went outside (the roof on top of the old terminal building) and saw a rotating wall cloud come over the bluffs to the south of the airport. You could hear the roar. The tornado didn't touch down until it hit the river, then did some damage in LeClaire, another in Port Byron, and another in Cordova. The worst damage was in Cordova, but it was over the Mississippi for quite awhile, thank goodness, so didn't do as much damage as it could have. We received about 10 videos from people taping the tornadoes and large hail. The best was from a college student who was home in Cordova when the tornado hit the town. He ran down in the basement with his family and kept taping. You could hear the hum/roar of the tornado as it approached and the house being damaged above them. Pretty amazing.

Of course with the old 74C radar, there was no way of capturing any of the imagery. But, as it moved away from the radar, we could see an incredible hook that wrapped in on itself moving up the river. One of the Quad City TV stations had a low-power, wide beam 5 cm radar and provided us a videotaped loop. It had a nice hook on their radar, but it got lost quickly as the storm moved away from the radar and the wide beamwidth couldn't resolve it. Another storm developed to the northwest and produced the Worthington IA F4 tornado. It was farther away from the radar but it still showed a nice hook before the tornado touched down.

It was the most exciting day in my young met career up to that time.
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Wow!! Very interesting! I was living in Silvis at the time. Even though the wall cloud passed very close by I can't recall hearing a roar. I also don't recall any inflow either, just an erie dead calm. I think at the time I was more fascinated with the hail, since it was the biggest I'd ever seen up to that point.

An ex girlfriend that I would meet years later lived in Cordova at the time. She used to tell stories about the houses just up the road getting damaged, along with a church and restruant. I was always jealous that she had seen more of a tornado than I had.:p
 
My first tornado was 3/13/90, the F3 tornado that started near Lowell, NE and moved through Buffalo and Hall counties.
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Just a couple of days ago, I was looking at Nebraska tornado climatology, and came across this map from 1990. The tornado you mention is present, but what I'm really curious about is the long-track tornado to the east of there. Looking through Storm Data, it appears this tornado was rated F4, but other than that, I haven't been able to find much information. Anyone have any tips?
 
By the way, can any of the mets who worked this event confirm whether the NSSFC/SELS had a high risk in effect on that day?
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I can't say for certain, but I have no doubt that there was a high risk in place that day. I've heard March 13th referred to as a "synoptically evident outbreak", which should always be associated with an SPC/SELS high risk (otherwise they wouldn't be "evident"--LOL). Also, if memory serves me, a modified sounding showed ~3500 j/kg of CAPE and >400 m2/s2 helicities in the Hesston area, which certainly meets high risk criteria.

Gabe
 
I was wondering if anybody has any video of the storms that occured on March 13, 1990. If so i would be very interested in buying a copy. :lol:
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The Tornado Project does, on their Tornado Video Classics tapes:

TVC I has
•Two videos of the Grand Island, NE event (F3)
•A video of the Hesston, KS event (F5) as it passed through town . . .
•. . . then a video taken as the Hesston tornado roped out and merged witht the next tornado family member (a tornado that went on to do F5 damage just W of Goessel, KS)
•A video of two tornadoes — consecutive members of the one family — on the ground nr. Wakita, OK

TVC II has
•A video of the Pilsen, KS, event; it was the next member of the tornado family after the Goessel tornado
•A video of the first tornado in the TVC I video from Wakita, OK . . .
•. . . and another of the second tornado as it passed near Caldwell, KS
•A video of the Hesston tornado as it passed over US-50 near Halstead, KS — the video was taken from a Halstead Police vehicle

TVC III has
•The video GPhillips mentioned of the Port Byron, IL, tornado taken from a house being hit by it.

Another Tornado Project video, Secrets of the Tornado, has brief segments of a different video of the Hesston, KS, tornado, and of a long-track event taped from near Lawrence, NE (see below).

There are more videos of most of these events, and others that day, but I don't know where (or if) they are available.

Just a couple of days ago, I was looking at Nebraska tornado climatology, and came across this map from 1990. The tornado you mention is present, but what I'm really curious about is the long-track tornado to the east of there. Looking through Storm Data, it appears this tornado was rated F4, but other than that, I haven't been able to find much information. Anyone have any tips?
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Significant Tornadoes says that this event started 3 mi. S of Red Cloud, and ended 3 mi. E of Schuyler; it was a family of tornadoes that moved along a 124-mile-long path through Webster, Nuckolls, Clay, Fillmore, York, Seward, Butler, and Colfax counties.

Damage occurred NE of Red Cloud (a farm was “‘completely wiped out’â€), and across Webster Co. (7 farms damaged, many livestock killed); in Nuckolls Co., 53 homes damaged, 8 destroyed in Lawrence, and 8 farms damaged; in Clay co., 11 businesses damaged, one destroyed, and 49 homes damaged in Sutton, and 20 farms damaged; in York co., 2 farms were destroyed, a motel unroofed, and a gas station and convenience store heavily damaged, 12 farms damaged (ca. 10,000 geese were killed), and 57 railroad cars were derailed nr. Waco; in Butler co., "numerous" farmsteads were damaged, and in David City, 35 homes were damaged or destroyed, 155 other structures damaged, and 1,200 livestock were killed or injured; four farms were damaged in Colfax co. The tornado just passed through corners of Fillmore and Seward counties, and only tree and power line damage resulted there. THe track in Butler co. “may have actually consisted of three separate tornadoes.â€

All up, 9 were injured, there were no human deaths, and the path was an average 400 yards wide.
 
It's hard to believe with such an incredible tornadic event there aren't more case studies and archived data about this event. I can't even find a satellite or radar scope of anything for this day. That's hard to believe since it was only 15 years ago. There has to be some more information out there somewhere.

I appreciate everything that everyone has added on this event though. I've seen more info on this page here about this event than I've ever seen before on it.... :)
 
It's hard to believe with such an incredible tornadic event there aren't more case studies and archived data about this event. I can't even find a satellite or radar scope of anything for this day. That's hard to believe since it was only 15 years ago. There has to be some more information out there somewhere.
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This may be in part due to the fact that the 26 April 1991 event overshadowed it. Plus, the 26 April 1991 event was the first of its kind to be sampled by the new WSR-88Ds in Central Oklahoma.

13 March 1990 was pretty incredible. As I recall, it was the third day in a string of severe weather. 11 March 1990 had the infamous Jon Davies tornadic mini-supercell in Central KS, and bust in Central OK (cap held). 12 March was a severe event in NC TX. I believe both of these events were accompanied by High Risk forecasts. Then 13 March, only a Moderate Risk (CYA?, and may have been upgraded later), and several of us in Norman were "too pooped" to chase too far north into Kansas. In fact, nobody in Norman chased into Kansas in those days. I don't know why (this was my second year after moving there). But central OK wasn't spared, as several training HP supercells passed just south of Norman, with a large rainwrapped F2 tornado in Washington OK which crossed the Canadian River and hit Noble. The track was about 3-4 miles from my present house in SE Norman. Another key event from 13 March 1990 was the Wakita tornado - beautiful sculpted superell with a highly visible tornado family. We believe it was this event that helped Wakita garner its spot in the movie Twister (no kidding!).
 
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