Glad to hear I wasn't the only one that was having "issues"! Definitely had some tense moments yesterday. The GPS tracking I used to plot my spot on the radar always seemed to be working and spot on, i.e. if I was in a town, it showed I was in that town on radar. So it seemed to be the position of the storm that was off
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2014-06-03 MISC: NE/IA
- Thread starter Stan Rose
- Start date
Bob Schafer
EF5
Ditto. When the first TOR was issued, GRL3 said I was well in the clear from the hook, yet I and Bill Robertson had to drive south a couple miles to drive INTO the northern fringe of the TOR polygon. Then, we never had severe winds, but they got interesting, and it was raining pretty good off and on despite GRL3 saying it shouldn't be raining at all. I think we were in sort of a low-level rain foot surrounding the *alleged* tornado that the radar couldn't see.
This was all early on, until we got a few miles SE of Ord, when everything got calm.
This was all early on, until we got a few miles SE of Ord, when everything got calm.
chrisbray
EF4
My question is this: How do you get the more classic supercell without the higher PWATS? Aren't they a product of high dewpoints? And isn't that moisture needed for higher CAPE values and lower LCLs?
Marcus Diaz
EF5
Not necessarily. You can have tornadoes with 50° dewpoints, as long as you have abundant sunshine, lower surface temps for the LCLs, and very steep lapse rates. Of course everything else like the shear and firing mechanism are involved. This goes much better for higher terrain such as the high plains out west. 4/20/2010 saw a nice cone tornado west of Amarillo with a spread of around 70/50. Very steep lapse rates and a decent pocket of CAPE value with a very slow moving storm due south, and everything just fell into place perfectly.. Now of course, when you have sun scorching down on 70+° dewpoints, that's when you get those obscene CAPE values over 5000. And if you have a decently sheared environment and a breakable cap...the Earth's crust will be getting a gash.
James Gustina
Supporter
Too much separation of updrafts and a worked over warm sector were a part of it. Most derechos are a result of extreme instability and decently strong deep-layer shear values around 35-40 knots with a mostly unidirectional profile with wide open warm sectors. Yesterday got complicated due to the surging OFBs throughout the day and multiple cold pool interactions making it difficult for one large line to become congealed/established.
joel ewing
EF5
I'm absolutely beat from some pretty serious white-knuckle driving that I did yesterday from Ord to I-80 at the height of that insanity yesteday. Thank God my chase partner / cousin Doren Berge and I had rented a brand new all-wheel-4x4 SUV, as if we had been in a 2 wheeler, I'm not sure we would have fared too well. Lost our front passenger window near Scotia that I'll have to pay for...I'm really happy about that. We saw at least 6-8 separate tornadoes yesterday. None had much of a condensation funnel, but there was zero doubt that these were actual tornadoes, as the rotation was low, often huge and fast. A child could have recognized these as tornadoes. Thinking back, I guess we saw 2 that had full condensation funnels. Some of them were actually quite large and a couple were multi-vortex. At times we saw more than one on the ground at once. These were not gustnadoes. At every instance, they were undercut by the brutal south moving front. We remarked to each other that had these not been undercut, we believe we would have had some large, long-tracked high-end tornadoes. Most of our tornado observations were from just south of Scotia and in Valley, Greeley and Nance counties. The largest was a multi-vortex in southern Nance county.
Earlier in the day, a cousin who manages a bank up in O'Neill Nebraska (Holt Co.) called me on my cell and said they had everybody in the bank, both employees and customers, huddling downstairs in the basement of the bank. The sirens were blasting in O'Neill he said, and he also mentioned that the town of Bassett, which is probably an hour drive west of O'Neill.....had winds over 100 miles per hour. Doren and I surmised that when that storm...or others in the area near there collapsed, this is what must have driven the southbound winds to surge at such a ridiculous pace. Truthfully, since we chased today in the Nebr. panhandle today and had a long drive to get in position, we didn't have time to analyze what actually happened or how other chasers fared. We did run into Jeff and Kathryn Piotrowski today at a steakhouse at lunchtime in Paxton Nebraska, and evidently Kathryn filmed a classic tornado just north of Ord yesterday. Doren and I had actually rolled into Ord a few minutes after they blew the sirens, and got caught in the tornadic/meso wide circulation as we drove to shelter at some spot on the abandoned airfield. Perhaps this is where we lost our passenger window, as we were getting hammered by extremely strong winds that blew debris as us from several different directions as the circulation passed over us. I really figured we'd #%^@* the pooch with that move, and when I looked at Doren his eyes were big as saucers. The thin, wrapping rain curtains were circling around us, as the local police escorted everybody on the road in the north part of Ord out of harm's way. I'll give them credit, they did a great job at rounding motorists up and giving them an escort to safety. Once the meso went over where we were parked, we tacked our way southward, keeping ourselves in the thick of things until we finally hit I-80...where we pointed ourselves towards North Platte in an effort to get a little closer to the Day 2 action. All-in-all....it was a very exciting day, we saw tornadoes, and experienced many of nature's flavors that most people try to avoid. This is what we sign up for each spring, and Doren and I are still out for another few weeks. With any luck, we'll stay safe and have some magnificent photo opportunites as we go along. I'm confident we will. In closing, it needs to be said that my birth state of Nebraska dodged several big bullets yesterday. Had these storms and tornadoes not been continually undercut.....there was a lot of misery and destruction that most likely would have taken place.
Earlier in the day, a cousin who manages a bank up in O'Neill Nebraska (Holt Co.) called me on my cell and said they had everybody in the bank, both employees and customers, huddling downstairs in the basement of the bank. The sirens were blasting in O'Neill he said, and he also mentioned that the town of Bassett, which is probably an hour drive west of O'Neill.....had winds over 100 miles per hour. Doren and I surmised that when that storm...or others in the area near there collapsed, this is what must have driven the southbound winds to surge at such a ridiculous pace. Truthfully, since we chased today in the Nebr. panhandle today and had a long drive to get in position, we didn't have time to analyze what actually happened or how other chasers fared. We did run into Jeff and Kathryn Piotrowski today at a steakhouse at lunchtime in Paxton Nebraska, and evidently Kathryn filmed a classic tornado just north of Ord yesterday. Doren and I had actually rolled into Ord a few minutes after they blew the sirens, and got caught in the tornadic/meso wide circulation as we drove to shelter at some spot on the abandoned airfield. Perhaps this is where we lost our passenger window, as we were getting hammered by extremely strong winds that blew debris as us from several different directions as the circulation passed over us. I really figured we'd #%^@* the pooch with that move, and when I looked at Doren his eyes were big as saucers. The thin, wrapping rain curtains were circling around us, as the local police escorted everybody on the road in the north part of Ord out of harm's way. I'll give them credit, they did a great job at rounding motorists up and giving them an escort to safety. Once the meso went over where we were parked, we tacked our way southward, keeping ourselves in the thick of things until we finally hit I-80...where we pointed ourselves towards North Platte in an effort to get a little closer to the Day 2 action. All-in-all....it was a very exciting day, we saw tornadoes, and experienced many of nature's flavors that most people try to avoid. This is what we sign up for each spring, and Doren and I are still out for another few weeks. With any luck, we'll stay safe and have some magnificent photo opportunites as we go along. I'm confident we will. In closing, it needs to be said that my birth state of Nebraska dodged several big bullets yesterday. Had these storms and tornadoes not been continually undercut.....there was a lot of misery and destruction that most likely would have taken place.
Rob H
EF5
I guess I'm a child/bad chaser then
Gustnadoes can do EF-1 damage, and with as gusty as those storms were, the potential was certainly there. Rotation strength and condensation have little to do with tornado vs. gustnado - it's completely dependent on whether there is an attached mesocyclone, which I saw zero indication of. Very happy to be proven wrong, but I saw no indication of organized rotation near that multi-vortex swirl as impressive as it was.
chrisbray
EF4
Thanks for the input. I guess since I have never chased farther west than the Lincoln, Nebraska area (and that was just in May for the first time) I have never had the chance to experience chasing the high plains like that. Mostly it's just been Illinois or eastern Iowa, and it's essentially all HP storms.
Rob H
EF5
A few things to touch on here...
High PWATs alone don't mean HP vs. Classic. An HP storm is just a storm with a weaker updraft that can't vent precipitation away from its core efficiently. Extreme CAPE, lower moisture, and better anvil winds can all help - and like most things in meteorology the mix of individual components is what's important. In this case we didn't have the extreme CAPE, lower moisture, or better anvil winds so these cells were pretty much doomed to be far to the HP side of the scale. One thing I've noticed with high humidity summer storms in the upper midwest is that they tend to need 3000-4000 MLCAPE to maintain a balanced storm mode that is more conducive to tornadoes. You fall below that and you tend to just get the type of HP gusty storms we saw on 6/3.
Also, precipitable water is a measurement of the water content in a column of air, of which the surface dewpoints are just a very small component. You can easily have a shallow moisture layer at the surface and be drier above. Higher CAPE values either need warmer parcel temperatures or cooler environment temperatures, and neither are completely tied to moisture content. They're tied to maximum moisture content, but that's irrelevant when assessing CAPE.
CAPE is also a really poor discriminator of tornadic potential. The beefiest tornado I've seen (4/14/12) was only in something like 2000 MLCAPE.
joel ewing
EF5
Rob, I don't know why you felt I was addressing any comment I made towards you. I haven't even read your post yet. Yes, in my 25 yrs. of chasing, I've seen more than a few gustnadoes. I sure wasn't attacking you....just writing about my personal experiences.
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Rob H
EF5
Don't worry, I didn't take it personally. Very little in the chasing community has the ability to affect me anymore - it's really all about the storms themselves and a handful of good friends
I brought it up because while you implied that there were clearly tornadoes south/east of Ord as the system progressed, everything from my perspective says they were strong gustnadoes. I have zero tornadoes this year, and I would *love* to have some of those intense swirls actually be tornadoes but I honestly don't think there was a single tornado once that storm left Ord. We rode the inflow notch from Ord past Fullerton and never saw anything that suggested anything besides a kickass outflow HP machine.
The Basehunters had a pretty good view of the swirls in question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-6Z2i8rlJE&feature=youtu.be
Bob Schafer
EF5
That was Scottsbluff 6-4. Got another link?
Rob H
EF5
Oops, looked almost identical to what we saw at times and didn't even notice that. Here's one from the actual day:
Watch video >
Rick Schmidt
EF3
I can say with certainty that the vortices that happened north of Seward around 7:00 were strong gustnadoes, since we were just over a mile north of them.
Winston Wells
EF1
FWIW, yesterday's survey by NWS Hastings found only two brief, EF-0 tornadoes associated with the Ord supercell: one a few miles NW of Elyria and another six miles north of Greeley.
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/news/display_cmsstory.php?wfo=gid&storyid=102689&source=0
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/news/display_cmsstory.php?wfo=gid&storyid=102689&source=0
