2015-5-27 ICT Radar Anomaly

[Kirk Chestnut]

At approximately 8 p.m. last night a friend of mine noticed a very intense (red) ball of reflectivity ENE of Medicine Lodge moving NE independent of storm motion. I didn't see it but wondered if it could have been birds or insects caught up between storms?

 

[rdale]

That's pretty likely. If you check out the dual-pol data that'd help...

 

[Tim Supinie]

Just looked at the radar loop, and I'm not quite sure what your friend was seeing. There are some non-meteorological echoes to the east-northeast of Medicine Lodge (KP28), but those aren't particularly intense, and they're also stationary.

For most sane reflectivity color tables, red nearly always means there's precipitation going on. The storm I circled to the south looks like it gets pushed northward by the outflow boundary. In that case it's not the mean wind or supercell processes that are governing the storm motion, but new updrafts preferentially develop on the north side of the old updraft because of the enhanced lift from the outflow boundary. Maybe that's what he/she was seeing?