A weak cold front has slowly been working its way through Michigan today, with storms firing ahead of it in a very soupy warm sector. Ugh! With temperatures the past several days ranging from the upper 80s to 90 degrees and dewpoints as high as 73 here in Caledonia, it’s about time things cooled off and dried out a bit.
Unfortunately–or fortunately, depending on your point of view–all that lovely moisture has been wasted on insipid lapse rates and humdrum wind fields. What can you do with 500 mb winds of 25 knots or less? Answer: not much.
So what’s with that red dot in Wisconsin in yesterday’s storm reports? Not only did a tornado occur near the town of Cambria, but from the looks of the YouTube videos I saw, it was fairly impressive. Certainly those were more than momentary spin-ups which that Little Storm That Shouldn’t Have put down.
How on earth did it do that? There was nothing happening synoptically that suggested even a remote possibility of tornadoes. So when that puny cell across the lake from me went tornado-warned on GR3 yesterday, I just shrugged it off. Obviously a fluke, some weak Doppler-detected rotation, signifying nothing.
Just goes to show how Mother Nature can mess with your head. According to the NWS office in Milwaukee, that little stinker put down a tornado that lasted 14 minutes, traveled four miles, and did EF1 damage. The level 2 velocity couplet on it was unmistakable. Here’s the full writeup by KMKX, complete with radar images and a photo of the storm right after the tornado had lifted.
Storm chaser Scott Weberpal speculated on Stormtrack that there may have been some kind of interaction between an outflow boundary left by earlier convection. I can’t imagine any better explanation for why what should have been a pussycat of a pulse-type summer storm turned into a barn wrecker. Had the storm gone tornadic farther east, the lake breeze might have been suspect, but the cell was well inland from Lake Michigan.
Today I noticed a couple storms over in the Flint area displaying weak rotation on the radar, and one of them took on that telltale supercellular shape. Given the anemic upper winds, I’d normally have instantly written them off, but after yesterday…well, I watched and wondered, not expecting anything and therefore not disappointed when nothing happened, but still curious. What might happen if any cells firing in that vicinity moved into the Huron lake breeze zone, where the veering surface winds were liable to back?
As it turns out, the storms behaved the way you’d have expected them to given their environment. The last of the line is presently moving through southeast Michigan. But dewpoints are still in the low 70s, and a few popcorn cells are sprinkling the radar. Through my sliding glass door, I can see a big, mushy tower making its debut. Think I’ll grab my saxophone and camera and head out to get some practice in. With a little luck, maybe I’ll get a few lightning photos as a bonus.
