2012-01-22 REPORTS: AR/MO/IL/TN/MS/AL

[Dan Robinson]

I chased the northern fringes of yesterday's tornado outbreak setup in extreme northeastern AR and southeast MO. Mileage for the day was 550. Here is a log with some photos and video:

http://stormhighway.com/blog2012/jan2312a.shtml

This has been the most active winter chase month I've had in 18 years. Counting winter weather outings (snow and ice), I'm already over 1,000 chase miles for 2012 as of January 23. 800 of those for convective severe weather on 1/17 and 1/22. Second only to February of 2008.

 

[Joshua Nall]

I was out this day in Eastern Arkansas. Stopped in Malvern and waited for initiation, then went on up to Little Rock only to drop back south from there to England to wait on the storms coming up from near Sheridan. These storms appeared to have caused a couple of tornadoes, but they weakened significantly as they approached my position. I dropped south again to catch the storm coming up from near Fordyce with the reported tornado there. Got West of the storm before it crossed 165 West of De Witt. Observed multiple power flashes under the meso as it approached, and one very bright power flash as it crossed the highway and hit the power lines along the highway. Not sure if these power flashes were due to RFD or a tornado back in there, as I wasn't able to make out anything really except a wall of grey. I then dropped further south, but only ran into a bit of hail and lightning with other storms down the line.

Looking to the West. Power flash as storm approached.

Very bright flash as storm crossed highway.

Looking to the Northeast, any tornado would have been completely wrapped in rain... from this vantage point anyway.

 

[Zack Hargrove]

Here's what we got from the DeWitt storm. We knew we needed to be further north and west, but we had such a great view and vantage point here in DeWitt looking NW, that we were reluctant to leave. So the video's not great and won't win any awards, but I thought you guys still may like to see it. The inflow and RFD from this storm were both pretty freaking intense.

Watch video >

 

[Wes Carter]

Since I cannot post in the advanced weather forums I'll post this here.

I chased with Jennifer Capps-Palmer. We considered heading towards Arkansas but decided that the timing would be off for us to catch something before dark.

We looked closer at Alabama and noticed that 0-1 km helicity was insane and there was some juicy high theta-e air pumping up into central Alabama. Our thoughts were that there would be pockets of instability that the models were not showing along the warm front.

We met in South Pittsburgh, Tennessee and headed down I-59 to Tuscaloosa. We saw some storms initiate east of Birmingham and went back but they dissipated before we made it back. After an encounter with a psychotic church lady we decided it was a bust and headed back to Tennessee and checked out damage paths from last April near Birmingham, Cullman, Madison, and Harvest.

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