Canyonlands Tornado: 9/22/06

[B Ozanne]

A friend of mine, Rob Chase, shot this tornado in Canyonlands National in southern Utah on Friday, 9/22. This was just north of the Island in the Sky Visitors Center. Temps were in the low 50's and the storms had bursts of hail and ice pellets.

Check the SPC storm reports, no mention of anything in Utah. Just reminds you of how much severe weather goes un-recorded.

http://img156.imageshack.us/my.php?image=canyonlands123ob5.jpg

 

[Susan Strom]

Hey that's pretty neat. What's cool is that there was actually somebody out there who saw it. That is proposterously big, sparsely populated country. A tornado, who knew.

 

[Shane Adams]

You can probably count every photog/chaser who's seen a tornado in Utah on one hand....minus the thumb.

That's perty neat.

 

[Bill Hark]

That's a great shot. I think the picture is interesting because of the not typical storm structure for tornadoes. If I saw that view just before the tornado, I would have thought, "neat storm, no tornadoes possible."

Bill Hark

 

[Dave Gallaher]

It actually looks somewhat like a waterspout from a line of cumulus, except for that little hint of an RFD.

The bulge lowering in the foreground of the first photo looks suspicious, too.

 

[Pat Lawrence]

Great pics!

No doubt tornadoes go unreported in the western US! Too many bumps to contend with I suppose.

Like Adams said, a shot from this area is extremely rare..unless, of course, it goes through downtown SLC

Pat

 

[B Ozanne]

Sorry about the photo size. I swore I had downsized them before uploading to imageshack. In a place where tornadoes are so rare the Salt Lake City tornado was quite a contrast. It was well documented and seen by many. Not me of course, I went to the U of U, but classes didn't start for a few more weeks and I was still on the east coast.

I've been curious if this was a true tornado, or if it was more ground/friction based. It certainly isn't a dust devil, which they see many out there. It may have some characteristics of a water spout save for the fact that it was no where near water.

 

[John Diel]

I have one situation in mind with this one. August 2004, Wellington, KS. This was a series or storms that were played out on a boundry. When I was in Kansas, I was looking at similar structure and had just about given up the Ghost for Tornadoes. There was one report of a Tornado in Udall, to the east, but I would never make that one. I happened to look north from South Haven and saw a straight up and down tube. Went ahead and drove north thinking it was a landspout at best because of the lack of tradition structure. This dissapated over the course of 10 minutes and another tornado appeared to the West and south of Wellington. It was a well formed tornado (rated F2 the next day) and remained almost stationary for 20 minutes before moving to the East and demolishing a brick home.

Again, it was the lack of traditional structure and the boundry play along the transition line that almost made me turn around and go home.