Area's geography prevents early warning

[Wesley Luginbyhl]

I was doing some searches on google and found this article from 1990 about Lubbock. It was part of a 20 year anniversary special in the Lubbock paper about of the 1970 Lubbock tornado. The article kind of reminds me of all those wierd tornado myths like "they can't cross rivers or mountains". Not what I was searching for on google, but it is still an interesting read.

Article

Here is the first part of the article:

Lubbock's geographic location works against the city in terms of advance warning of severe weather, according to most meteorologists.

"There's a real hazard in West Texas because these storms can break right on top of us," said Richard E. Peterson, director of Texas Tech University's atmospheric science group.

"Many storms start here and then shift eastward, giving people in Wichita Falls or Oklahoma some advance warning," he said. "Here, we don't have warning in advance."

 

[David Drummond]

Living out here just about all my life, I can tell you in fact this is true. Storms can and do pop right over the city, and depending on the setup can go severe in a very short time, sometimes before they leave the city area. The dryline likes to slosh back and forth out here, and wherever it's at when the storms pop, that's often where the svr starts.