There”s nothing like a trip down Memory Lane in late November, particularly when it comes courtesy of Discovery Channel. Last night I convened with my storm chasing partners Bill and Tom Oosterbaan over at Bill”s house, and we watched the episode “There”s No Place Like Kansas” from the Storm Chasers series.\r\n\r\nIt was great to sit and reminisce with me droogs about May 23. We missed the Quinter tornadoes, but Reed Timmer and Joel Taylor”s superb footage of the strikingly photogenic elephant”s trunk got me feeling all warm and fuzzy. What a beautiful tornado! We had very much the same view of it as those guys, to the extent that I”m guessing our vehicles were parked pretty close to each other.\r\n\r\nWish we could have seen the Quinter wedge. I suspect we wound up on the backside of it, though, and that a couple of the tornadoes I filmed subsequent to the elephant”s trunk were in fact satellite vortices. I have no way to confirm this; I”m left to speculation, based on the fact that the funnels were on the backside of a huge mesocyclone to our northeast, and I felt at the time that its black, rainy interior harbored something big.\r\n\r\nAnyway, it was fun to relive that day with Tom and Bill, even the part where we nearly got sideswiped by the DOW. It”s all part of the story. I hope we do as well in 2009–and if 2008 was the year of the HP supercell, I hope next year will be the year of the classic.\r\n\r\nBut right now, it”s November, it”s snowing, and from where I sit, I”ll take whatever I can get.
Archives for November 24, 2008
Rare 1965 Palm Sunday Tornado Photos
I was a kid living in Niles, Michigan, when the 1965 Palm Sunday Tornadoes swept through the Midwest, including areas just twenty miles to my south. Among the photos in the newspapers was one I’ve never been able to find on the Internet. Some years ago, while researching the event at the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Library, I came across that photo (appearing second in order below) and its brother, which precedes it.
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Regretfully, I don’t know the name of the photographer and so can’t credit the photos the way I’d like. If that person happens to stumble across this blog, though, I’d be delighted to hear from him or her, and I invite them to post a comment.
What I do recall is that the description placed the tornado between LaPaz and Wyatt. The stout column in the second photo does seem to correspond with another shot I”ve seen of the LaPaz funnel.
More is going on in these two images than is immediately apparent. The photos seem to depict a hand-off between two different funnels. In the second image, the narrow, cone-shaped tornado shown in the first photo appears to have dissipated into the nub-like lowering on the left side of the wall cloud in photo two, while a new funnel has materialized to the right. This is corroborated by what appears to be a barely noticeable, slim tube in the first photo, located by the left, bottom branch of the left tree in the midground. The image quality in this post requires that you squint and use your imagination to see the tube, which, in this smaller format, looks like a tiny, hair-thin, downward extension of the branch. However, in the original, larger print, you can clearly make out the tube as cloud material. Its position suggests that it was forming as the funnel to the left was getting ready to lift–a transfer of energy from one vortex to another within the wall cloud.
ADDENDUM: Credit for the photos goes to Willis Haenes. Many thanks to Jim Stewart for providing the name of the photographer. Click on “Comments” below to read Jim”s message. The bottom photo appeared in a groundbreaking paper by Dr. Ted Fujita on the Palm Sunday Outbreak. According to a map by Fujita, the view is from Bremen, Indiana, looking west toward just north of LaPaz.
