8/19/09 NOW: MN, IL

[jshields]

apparently a tornado has touched down in downtown minneapolis with damage being reported to a church near the convention center. no warnings were issued in advance as the whole area just looked like a broad area of light to moderate rain! i took a look at the srv loop and you can see brief areas of rotation that seem to pop up right near downtown when the warning came out. a second area is tornado warned just southeast of downtown as well. also about 15 minutes ago a tornado was reported on the ground by spotters near jacksonville, illinois heading to the northeast towards springfield, illinois.

 

[KKoch]

Listening to Hennepin County dispatch and lots of downed trees and power lines south of downtown Minneapolis in the 24th st to 34th st and Portland/5th Av general area. I'm in the Accenture Tower (333 s. 7th st) facing south, but didn't see or hear anything until the 2:11pm funnel warning for St. Anthony.

 

[Glenn Schubert]

Tornado Warned cell with strong rotation is heading right toward Springfield, IL! My agencies HQ is there.

 

[Rocky Rascovich]

These stations are streaming excellent coverage of the weather events as of 1508cdt.

http://www.wccoradio.com/ Minneapolis, MN.
http://www.wmay.com/listen/ Springfield, IL.

 

[Jeff Duda]

I've been listening to WMAY out of Springfield. It sounds like at least one tornado being confirmed by damage to houses and debris laying in fields (insulation) east of Laomi, and a sheriff's deputy confirming a tornado and 20-25 homes/buildings heavily damaged near Williamsville and Sherman, including a Casey's general store just off I-55 damaged heavily.

 

[Sam Stone]

Just got back to work, my apartment in south Minneapolis missed a routing by about 3-4 blocks. East of that, there's quite a bit of damage, huge trees uprooted and houses damaged--see the pics on www.wcco.com for that.

Sam

 

[Dustin Wilcox]

Storms firing just W of Vance AFB. Hopefully things become somewhat established before they cross the boundary, then tornado as they interact with the boundary, which is now lifting NE quite a bit quicker…

Storms intensifying across E and SE NE now as well, though can't imagine they'll do much more than produce some marginal hail, given the worse than sub-par shear...

 

[Matthew Piechota]

got 2 tornadoes southeast of lincoln IL, about 20 mins before saw major damage to a house with the roof completely ripped off and trees knocked over with corn plowed over by it.

we were a bit far away from the first one but able to see it pretty easily and caught the second one as it was starting to rope out.

 

[Jason Bolt]

Probably time to add OK to this. First cell of the day for the plains is going up near Enid. Still small, but went from clear to 50 db in about 30 minutes. For those on the 35 corridor this could be the first of many.

 

[L Kimbrel]

Rats!! Backyard chasing and I was stuck at work, in town in the post office with no view in any direction of anything. Had to settle for second-hand reports by cell phone from my under-employed sister while I fed her updates off the office computer. What a bummer.....

 

[Jeff Snyder]

Convection up here (I'm in Enid) is struggling, obviously. The original "storms" to my immediate north evaporated, and the convective initiation attempts to my W and SW are struggling. The updrafts all are quite skinny, which I don't particularly like, but there is some clumping occurring. Mostly, though, they are all heavily leaning, and the bases are ragged / not flat. From a shear, LCL, and instability standpoint, things up here look quite good, particularly for the time of year. However, I wonder how much low-level CINH is present considering the look of these towers. Vis sat doesn't show much else to the south, despite the warmer temps (i.e. 90F in Kingfisher), so I'll probably hang out in and around END in the near-term. We all know how quickly the convective situation and organization can change, so I'm still hopeful. I may hedge a bit eastward, but I wanted to keep good access to a nice N-S highway (such as US 60/64 N of END). Not much in the way of healthy cellular Cu can be seen away from this "clump" near END.

EDIT: Quite look out the window actually shows a nice, long elevated funnel from the side of a decaying updraft. Neato.

EDIT 2: Now that I write that, a TCu to my immediate SSW is pulling in some scud from beneath the updraft base. A good sign if it can continue, since I assume that's a better sign that surface air is being ingested. The RUC soundings from earlier today had me concerned about moisture depth (at least of the ~70 F Tds) from here westward, which is partially why I was trying to hedge closer to I35 for chasing today). Hopefully there isn't too much in the way of drier air immediately above the sfc that is mixing with the good moisture being sampled by sfc obs.

 

[Jason Bolt]

Decided to sit this one out, first day of school for the kids and all... now I'm sitting here about to puke looking at the couplet on the cell near Sedan.

 

[Jason Bolt]

And of course it is TOR warned now. New MD out for southeast KS southwest MO. And what really sucks is I knew I couldn't make it to I35 and was planning on targeting 166 between Sedan and Ark City.

EDIT: New SVR issued Montgomery Co. Storm seems to be taking a slight right turn.

EDIT: at 9:17 nice looking couplet west of Coffeyville.