May 22nd funnel vs. scudnado question

[Darrin Rasberry]

After ten months, I finally got around to figuring out how to transfer my Hi-8 tapes onto video. After looking through my tape for May 22nd, I found a brief clip I'd forgotten I'd even filmed. I'll offer it to you and probably get embarrassed, but it's better than throwing out a potentially nice fifteen seconds of a memoir of 2008 that I'm putting together for future study on how not to be a newb.

This clip was taken out in a field deep in the dirt roads a few miles NE of Collyer, Kansas, looking to the SW towards I-70 on 5/22 last year. Time would have been somewhere between 7:15-7:30 or so. I had to excuse myself and I recall seeing what looked like a long pin extend in the distance and just hang there about 1/3 down from what I thought to be nonrotating structure. Craig stayed in the car to wait so he did not see it.

I wanted to figure out what it was, but thought it would be long gone by the time I got my camera from the front seat and ran back to that spot; to my surprise, however, the pin was still there when I got back. I managed a brief shot of it before it dissipated. There looks to be some kind of tail off to the right hand side of the parent structure and it is lowered in general, but it's broad and had no other typical structural characteristics for a wall cloud that I could see from my vantage. So I'm guessing all this is much ado about nothing.

Still, I kept returning to this vid this morning instead of deleting it from the hard drive, since I'm interested to see whether this could possibly have been a funnel instead of the lowest of the overhangs on a shelf edge or a genuine scudnado.

Here is the Hi-8 highest quality transfer for download. It is the best viewing file I have (edit: 45mb): http://www.videos.asharedconfidence.com/dvmovie.avi

If you don't prefer to DL that file or you do not have the software to look at .avi (I wouldn't know the least about what does and does not "run" videos of any sort of file type), you can try this wmv download of it instead, but as always, the windows media version cuts out too much of the essentials: http://www.videos.asharedconfidence.com/Scudnado.wmv

A Youtube video upload attempt turned the whole thing to indecipherable chop suey. Let me know if these files don't work as they are the first video I've placed on my new server space (thanks David Drummond) and I may have not set them up properly for anyone other than my own IP.

Thanks (again!) in advance to all who help.

 

[Verne Carlson]

Hi Darrin,
Based on your position and direction you were filming - I would bet that you saw this tornado. It was on the ground for a good 5 minutes or so and was confirmed by many chasers as a tornado. It was one of two that were on the ground at the same time south of Collyer. The larger cone to the west was becoming occluded at the same time this new meso was forming to the east and dropping this needle tornado.

 

[Darrin Rasberry]

Haha, oh wow. Would this have been the right place to see it, as well? Was there no wrapup back to the east of this?

I checked the SPC reports for that day and both pre-Wakeeney storms reported for 5/22 seem too early, but the clip prior to this was a shot I took of Craig and I deciding to dirt it out to the position that ended up being where this was shot. There is a TOR warning over radio that "expires at 7:30." We were on the dirt for about ten or fifteen minutes off 283 just north of I70 at this time, headed west.

Craig took a look at the vid and said himself it looked like one from my clip's vantage. He didn't see it because I don't think he particularly wanted to go back to where I had to ... rain on the parade, so to speak, plus he was checking out what would eventually be the WaKeeney cell at the time, which our nowcaster Fabian was discussing. Just want to make doubly sure before I call this one, what a nice treat, but goodness did I have my head somewhere else. I can't stop lolling that I saw one in the countryside when I had to do some quick business.