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2011-04-09 DISC: NE/IA

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mike Smith
  • Start date Start date
I have a photo of the same feature... note the subtle funnel above the dust plume:

5608377697_c13221ab4f.jpg


This was East of Onawa about 7 miles, just before entering the bluffs on HWY 175.
 
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The damage path was 2-3 miles. However the damage doesn't conform to the dimensions of the visible funnel. Most often the damage extends beyond even the visible debris and funnel cloud should there be one. Then add the extended high winds with the RFD and you can get an appreciation for the scope of the damage.
 
I caught the tail end of this activity, which appears in the very first part of my video. I have some video that wasn't included in this edited version, likely at the exact time that Danny was filming, although I was positioned NE of the feature. I will review this tonight for evidence of any circulation above. If it was a tornado then it didn't last long, because the majority of what you see at the beginning of this video were gustnadoes with no discernible funnel or circulation aloft. My video was shot on a county highway south of Turin and west of Hwy 183.

 
True, part of doing a survey is discerning between what's RFD and what's the tornado. However, after seeing some of the pics from Saturday night, perhaps it's possible there was a very wide tornado on the ground at some point. I would be very curious as to what the damage looked like in that area.
 
Jeff Duda said:
I included this image in my post in the REPORTS thread, but I'd really like to get multiple opinions on the feature; it looks very suspicious to me, and I didn't even see it until I ripped the image off of my camera after I got home last night. The image was taken from either just west of, or north of Schleswig shortly after 8 PM, looking northwest.

Whatever the circled feature is, it looks to be in the correct place relative to the large RFD clear slot to be a tornado, but I didn't get far enough north or west to tell for sure. Was anyone closer to Ida Grove or Arthur to conform or deny my belief that this may be a tornado? The Sioux Falls office did include a tornado southwest of Arthur in their PNS, which would be very near where this picture was taken: http://www.crh.noaa.gov/news/display_cmsstory.php?wfo=fsd&storyid=66507&source=0
Click to expand...

I pulled my GPS data to clarify the situation. I am 99% sure I took this picture looking northwest from about 2/3 mi east of the intersection of US 59 and county road D54 at about 8:04 PM. I've attached a radar screengrab showing my position (red dot) relative to the storm when this photo was shot.

KOAX_20110410_0104_BV.png


This spatially lines up very well with FSD's report of the Arthur tornado, but it does not line up with the time. Thus I remain unable to confirm or deny that this is a tornado.
 
Time-Lapse

Observed the prolific Iowa supercell for over four hours. The link to a time-lapse of the photos I took at night. By far this was the most amazing nighttime supercell I have had the pleasure to observe. I hope to get the daytime images ready tomorrow.

 
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Jeff,

The mesocyclone in your velocity pic is not that which was associated with the "Arthur" tornado. It began earlier than the Arthur tornado and is indeed associated with the wedge in your picture in question. I saw this wedge in the lightning for multiple minutes as I headed east on the road that runs just south of Ricketts, and then as I turned north on US59. It disappeared behind precipitation some time before I stopped on the east/west road 3 miles north of Schleswig (the road that runs on the county line which is black in my pic) to film the Arthur tornado develope. I was about one mile east of US59 on that county line road when I stopped to film, and the tornado was about due north of me and moving off to the east-northeast or northeast. On my video this tornado occurred from about 8:19 pm to at least 8:26 pm.

Just confirming that it was indeed a wedge that you photographed and the 8:04 pm time you have matches up with when I was seeing the wedge to my northwest as I was driving east, just west of US59 and then north on US59 toward and past Schleswig.

IdaGrove-Arthur.png
[/IMG]
 
Karen Politte said:
I'm just wondering what your reasoning was behind proactively driving into the outer circulation of this tornado?

Thanks,

KP
Click to expand...

Hey, you're calling us out too, because that's our Ford Explorer at the end of Darin's video! :)

I won't speak for Darin, but my chase partner has experience with being close to violent tornadoes and I trust him completely. We were toeing the line, but we felt safe given what was above us, how fast the storm was moving and what the tornado was doing. There were no power lines on our road and very few trees nearby. The strongest winds we experienced were roughly 80mph from the NW (confirmed by mobile mesonet) which is nothing to take lightly, but RFD or bow echos can easily produce that so they weren't too alarming.

The most important thing is that we felt in control of the situation, and we had multiple escape paths easily available. The storm was moving to the NE, and the tornado eventually hooked north as it lifted as they tend to do. Our road, 175, was perfectly situated to face the tornado and escape to the SW if we needed to.
 
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Robert Hurkes said:
Hey, you're calling us out too, because that's our Ford Explorer at the end of Darin's video! :)

I won't speak for Darin, but my chase partner has experience with being close to violent tornadoes and I trust him completely. We were toeing the line, but we felt safe given what was above us, how fast the storm was moving and what the tornado was doing. There were no power lines on our road and very few trees nearby. The strongest winds we experienced were roughly 80mph from the NW (confirmed by mobile mesonet) which is nothing to take lightly, but RFD or bow echos can easily produce that so they weren't too alarming.

The most important thing is that we felt in control of the situation, and we had multiple escape paths easily available. The storm was moving to the NE, and the tornado eventually hooked north as it lifted as they tend to do. Our road, 175, was perfectly situated to face the tornado and escape to the SW if we needed to.
Click to expand...

No - I'm not really calling anyone out. I haven't been on the forum for a long time and I am just trying to ask some philosophical questions to help me try and understand what has happened to the chaser community.

I mean - I understand that people feel that they are (or are with) veteran chasers etc. and therefore feel relatively in control of the situation - but since when did that equate to "let's go drive into this tornado right in front of us"? Chasers have absolutely no way of knowing what sort of wind fields they are going to experience, what sort of airborne debris you will encounter, or even if multiple vortices with higher windspeeds may form outside of the main circulation you are targeting.

I am just wondering what difference there is in viewing a tornado from 1/4 mile away on a road, versus viewing it from inside it's outer debris sheath. I mean - apart from having your view obscured by atomized rain/dust if you do "enter it"......which actually lends weight to the argument NOT to enter the tornado.

Cheers,

KP
 
Chip Redmond said:
In the storm surveys their seems to be many crossing paths over a very small area. Would be interested to know if these were all at the same time or from different storms. I haven't had time to look at archived radar to see where the other storms crossed in relation to the earlier storms but it would be really interesting to see if there was at least a large multivortex on the ground. Going to take alot of time to go back over these, my images, and our path to determine what tornadoes I was seeing at what time. What a crazy night!



Chip
Click to expand...

I had a great view of the storm when it was in Ida and Sac Counties. The storm had two distinct wall clouds at the same time, the western one produced the Arthur IA tornado around 8:15, the eastern wall cloud then became the main show, producing two tornadoes (rather close to each other in both time and geography, I think these were the two tornadoes that developed near Odebelt around 8:40) shortly after the Arthur tornado lifted, both of which appeared to be developing as wedge funnels but were lost to the darkness and precipitation to us. Each of the three tornadoes seemed to have a slightly different motion vector, but they were all definitely spawned from the same supercell. It wouldn't surprise me if the storm continued producing multiple tornadoes all the way towards Pocahontas, and I think this was the only storm that really was tornadic on Saturday night.
 
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