Skip Talbot
EF5
Quite an eventful day for me! Started off the day heading toward Scottsbluff and arrived in town shortly after 1pm local time. Storms were starting to fire off of the higher terrain in Wyoming and were making their way toward the Nebraska panhandle. We slowly made our way toward the storms and set up just southwest of Scottsbluff. One of the suddenly intensified on radar and developed a nice hook on radar with decent rotation on the velocity scans. We noticed some lowerings in the distance with the storm and saw some dirt being picked up into the updraft. Unfortunately, with the bluffs and hills in the way, it was hard to determine if a tornado occurred for sure in that area; however, there was a visible debris cloud beneath what I think was the main circulation (and there were even small funnels), so I believe a tornado may have touched down briefly. I submitted my report online with some pictures as well, but have yet to hear anything back about it yet.
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The storm didn't last too long, however, died within a half hour to an hour after it dropped the possible tornado. New storms were firing off in the northern pandhandle and eastern Wyoming, so we made our way north to check out those storms. One storm in Wyoming a tornado warning on it, and according to GRLevel3, had over a 100 knots of gate to gate shear and 3.75 inch hail on it. We made our way to that storm, but by the time we had gotten to it, it had weakened significantly. Still, the storm had impressive structure with it, and we watched the meso of the storm come toward us while slowly becoming outflow dominant.
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A friend had some software that did panamora's and helped me stitch together the above image. I thought it came out very well considering I did not have a tripod handy!
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I also got a video timelapse of the feature as it moved toward us. I think I may have captured some Kelvin-Helmholtz wave action going on between the 28 and 45 second mark in the meso (it's a little easier to see in HD on the video).
Watch video >
Great shots, Dan. Loved the stacked meso. The funnel and debris cloud shot looks a lot more like scud and curling outflow rather than a tornado, however. Do you have video of these features showing any strong rotation? When the forward flanking downdraft associated with the precipitation (right side of the image) hits the ground, it fans out and curls back at the ends. There's a hill in the foreground blocking where you'd see the outflow fanning out, but you can make out the top of the curl where the outflow hits the warmer air/inflow ahead of the storm. This warmer air gets forced up over the top of the outflow and you wind up with a bunch of scud marking the edge of this outflow boundary. I've contrast enhanced and labeled the image to make it a little more clear:
![dmckemy01.jpg](/proxy.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fskip.cc%2Fchase%2Ftemp%2Fdmckemy01.jpg&hash=0641af25ecb077d80c62ae363e27e36f)
Check out some of Doswell's shots for reference:
http://www.flame.org/~cdoswell/microbursts/Additions.html
That's my one picture analysis, so its definitely suffering from some tunnel vision and may not be completely accurate, but it looked like a pretty classic outflow/curling rain foot example to me.