4/3/2011 DISC: IA/KS/MO

[Skip Talbot]

I was wondering if anyone had any pictures or further information on the funnels reported reported near Kinross, IA:

Brad Emel2011-04-04 00:08:00 UTC(S) FunnelSpotter is 1 miles W of Kinross, IAsmall double funnels extending from ragged wall with good upward motion

I was on a cell just to the north and was curious as to what was going on down there.

Overall, I don't think we got the backed low level winds that we badly needed by those surface lows. I was hoping some of the more northern cells in Iowa would start to tap the better directional shear to the north, but interference from other cells initiated by the boundary-parallel midlevel flow was another major problem. I was surprised at the almost total lack of tornado warnings across the entire region given all the wall cloud (and some funnel) reports coming in. Hats off to the NWS for not pushing the button on a tornado warning based on these reports and sticking to their radar analysis and/or ground reports as there are no tornado reports in the LSR's.

 

[Adam Lucio]

I was assuming it was these guys when that report came in along with other funnel reports at the same time:

I think there were even some reports of a rapidly rotating wall cloud too. Clearly we have a wall cloud, but I never really noticed any significant rotation but then again some people could have been closer.

 

[John Wetter]

Yep, that was about the same time, judging from the streams. I'd tend to agree with you that calling those funnels is probably excessive.

 

[Brandon Redmond]

I was on the wall cloud and never saw any significant rotation - nice structure but was never quite got there.

 

[Danny Neal]

There were no funnels or any moderate let alone strong rotation evident from my location. The area of interest passed a mile north of me. Watched it for 15 minutes and never felt the need to phone/type in an urgent report.

 

[Brandon Redmond]

Two of my favorite pictures from yesterday.

 

[Joel Wright]

We were 4-5 miles south of the wall cloud around that time. This is the closest thing to a funnel we saw. This sort of looks like a funnel, but can't tell for sure. Certainly wasn't a "double funnel" anyway. The wall cloud was slowly rotating at this point, but I couldn't tell if there was rotation with that funnel-like feature or not. Either way it wasn't impressive.

 

[AaronPippin]

I was on the above mentioned storm as well. I didn't observe what I would consider funnels either but I do believe Adam's picture describes what they report was referring to. I was about 2 miles closer than Adam was at the time of his picture if I remember right.
I made a report of a rotating wall cloud at 00:21z, 13 minutes after the funnel report. You can watch my video from yesterday.
Watch video >
At the 2:00 mark you can see the wall cloud that looks very disorganized. At 2:45 you hear me talking about whether its rotating, and like you hear me say the cloud in the foreground is moving left to right and the background clouds are moving from right to left. You can hear me start typing and thats when I am making the report. When you look at the 2:00 mark compared to the 2:45 you can see where I got the notion that the rotation has really came together. But as all of us know that shortly there after it becomes disorganized and turns to crap again concerning the wall cloud and low-level rotation.
Overall it was a good day, even without tornadoes, as watching the storms go up is such a short amount of time was amazing to watch. The lightning was incredible for early April in Iowa, as it was something you would typically see in the summer months as at one point right at dusk there was nearly constant lightning flashes out of one single storm.

Aaron

 

[Matthew Piechota]

I'd be surprised if there were any legit funnel clouds from yesterday. The low-level turning just wasn't there and never saw any tight low-level rotation I was on the northern storm near Tipton, IA. It got nicely organized for about 20 mins and developed a nice RFB and associated wall cloud but it was not rotating. One thing to note though is we had slightly backed sfc inflow for about 10 mins at this time before it became outflowy.

I also went back and look at the IA mesonet sfc maps for yesterday at 6pm and the Creston tornado day a 6pm and you can tell pretty quick why it happened that day and not yesterday.