April 27, 2011, Southern Outbreak: When a Nightmare Becomes Reality

The death toll from yesterday’s tornadoes in the South presently stands at 231,* and it continues to climb. In the battered town of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 36 people are dead; in Birmingham, at least 30 more.** From

April 27 2011 AL SRV
Mississippi to as far north as upstate New York, the worst tornado outbreak in 37 years has left communities sifting through a battleground of leveled buildings, crumpled automobiles, downed power lines, tortured trees, and a horrifying number of casualties. This has been no mere tornado outbreak; it has been a tornado nightmare.

“You’re talking about whole neighborhoods of housing just completely gone,” said Birmingham Mayor William Bell in an NPR interview. “Churches, gone. Businesses, gone. I’m not talking about just roofs being blown off, but just completely gone.”**

I knew that a dangerous weather event was brewing in the South yesterday. But with my mother undergoing a knee replacement, I spent most of the day at Blodgett Hospital here in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I knew nothing of what was transpiring down in Mississippi, Tennessee, and the epicenter of the outbreak, Alabama, until later in the evening, when I finally left the hospital, fired up my laptop, and got my first look at the radar.

There it was, spread out before me: a blitzkrieg of intense supercells swarming across Alabama and Tennesse, attended by so many tornado reports that they obscured parts of the map. My heart dropped into my gut. I didn’t need any news reports to tell me that something awful was happening and people were getting killed.

Immediately I thought of my long-time friend and storm chasing partner, Bill Oosterbaan. He was down there somewhere in Alabama. I had no question that he’d seen tornadoes, but was he safe? I couldn’t reach him at first on his cell phone, but eventually we connected and Bill shared his story. He had been about a quarter-mile behind a tornado that hit Huntsville and gotten rained on by debris. It sounded bad, but Bill was okay, had witnessed five tornadoes, and had gotten video footage.

After talking with Bill, I began searching for news on Facebook and the Internet. The first video I saw was Chris England’s footage of the Tuscaloosa tornado as it chewed through the city. “Andover!” I thought. “It looks like the Andover tornado.” (An F5 monster that struck Andover, Kansas, on April 26, 1991.) More YouTube videos followed: Mind-boggling views of the Tuscaloosa storm. TWC footage of a violent, mile-wide wedge moving through Birmingham. An intense tornado striking Cullman. It was horrible. The storms were ongoing even as I watched, and it dawned on me that, overworked as the word “epic” has become, here was a situation where it applied.

I am appalled by the news and deeply saddened. As good as today’s weather warning system is, nevertheless the death toll is mind-numbing. I frankly expected a few score fatalities, and that in itself would have been too many. Lives are lives. But this many lives…it is just sickening. Were it not for the unswerving vigilance of the Storm Prediction Center and the National Weather Service; and were it not for today’s NEXRAD system that blankets the nation with Doppler radar to provide coverage that far outstrips what existed during the historic 1974 Super Outbreak and 1965 Palm Sunday Outbreak; were it not for these things, then the death toll from yesterday would have been apocalyptic. As it stands, it is horrifying, and the number continues to grow.

My writing on this event is finished for now. There is simply too much to say and too much news that is yet breaking, along with countless hearts. The story has just begun, and more can be told only as it becomes known. My thoughts and prayers go out, with those of countless other storm chasers, to the survivors of this terrible disaster.

————————————

* From CNN’s live blog.

** From NPR’s news blog, “The Two-Way.”

April 28, 2011 by
Filed Under: Life, Opinion & Editorial, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Weather Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

April 14-16 Southeast Tornado Outbreak: Thoughts and Images

There are times when the sight of a high risk sickens rather than excites me, and Saturday was one of those days. It’s one thing when severe storms occur in the Great Plains where the population is sparse, but when a swarm of tornadoes roars across an area punctuated with cities and towns, all I can think is, “Oh no. All those people!” Such was the case with last week’s horrendous three-day tornado outbreak across the South and East.

The outbreak commenced Thursday in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Arkansas, with a preliminary figure of 27 tornadoes reported.* The action ramped up Friday in Louisiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, with an initial tally of 120 tornadoes. Day three was the worst of all, with yet another 120 reported tornadoes slashing across the populous, densely forested Southeast and East from South Carolina to as far north as Pennsylvania. Hardest hit was North Carolina, where large and powerful tornadoes ripped through Raleigh and other communities. Twenty-two lives were lost, 11 of them when a three-quarter-mile-wide, EF3 monster carved a 19-mile path across Bertie County. Another six died in Virginia. And in its previous two days, the outbreak claimed seven lives in Arkansas, seven in Alabama, two in Oklahoma, and one in Mississippi.

In all, Saturday’s tornadoes were North Carolina’s most lethal since 1984, when 42 died. And regionally, Friday and Saturday were the worst tornado outbreak in the Southeast since the Super Tuesday Outbreak of February 5–6, 2008, when 87 tornadoes killed 57 people in four Dixie Alley states.

But my point in writing this article isn’t to provide yet another news story on the disaster. Rather, it’s to share my feelings as I watched it unfold. With some truly amazing video coming in from chasers in Oklahoma, the first day was fascinating. Day two, watching tornadic supercells crawl across Mississippi and Alabama on the radar was unnerving; I hoped nothing bad would happen down there in the South, but I knew better. On day three, when I saw the high risk go up in North Carolina, my heart sank.

When it comes to armchair chasing, I’m moderate in my habits. If I can’t actually be out chasing, I often opt for a more constructive use of my time than watching the radar and gnawing my knuckles. This time, though, I couldn’t help watching. At first the line of storms looked mean but not terribly alarming. As the storms headed east, though, they began to organize and strengthen, and circulations began to show on radar. Strong circulations, a whole line of them, stretching from northern South Carolina up into Maryland and Virginia. And the tornado reports began filtering in. These storms didn’t merely appear to be impacting towns–they were.

I watched one monster chew through Raleigh, thinking, “No way!” Then came the videos on YouTube, one of them by chasers at unnervinglyclose range, and I knew. No one was dodging the bullet this time. Neighborhoods were being pulverized and people were dying.

With fiscal conservatives recently wanting to slash the budget of the National Weather Service, all one has to do is witness a scenario like last weekend’s in order to realize the supreme lunacy of such a move. Tornado season is just getting started. More is on the way. Bad as last week was, we could yet see worse. How smart is it to pull the rug out from under our national weather warning system at precisely the time of year when its optimal service is most needed?

But I digress. Here are a few GR2AE radar grabs of the North Carolina supercells. Storm motions were to the northeast. The rest tells its own story if you know what you’re looking at.

First, here’s are a couple macroscopic views.

april-16-eastern-outbreak
april-16-eastern-outbreak1

Next, I’ve zoomed in on the Raleigh radar to  cross-check reflectivity and storm-relative velocity on a couple supercells.

raleigh-nc-ref
raleigh-nc-srvpng

The final image was taken after the storms had moved out to sea. It shows a couple of northern line-end vortices that I found interesting and thought you might too.

line-end-vortices-ref

____________________
* All numbers reflect preliminary reports at the time of this post’s publication. Final statistics will likely be different.

April 18, 2011 by
Filed Under: Life, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Weather, Weather Radar Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dixie Alley Lights Up

Severe storms have been pushing through Dixie Alley this afternoon and evening, fed by dewpoints in the mid 60s to lower 70s and propped by bulk shear in the 60-70kt range. The action has been largely in Louisiana, where tornado warnings have been ongoing for several hours and tornado damage has been reported northwest of Atlanta.

Typical of southeastern storms, these ones look pretty HP-ish, real drenchers. They’ve waned in intensity from earlier, but they’re still dangerous storms, and one of them  in East Carroll County is presently tornado-warned.

kshv_20101129_2107
Here’s a GR2AE volume scan from the Shreveport radar depicting storm-relative velocity at 2107Z. Click on the image to enlarge it. You can see a pronounced couplet, indicating strong base-level rotation. I believe this was in fact the storm responsible for the tornado report, although two others in the same region displayed potent mesocyclones. More tornado reports may turn up from that part of Louisiana before the night is through.

November 29, 2010 by
Filed Under: Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Weather Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Chasing the Great Lakes Superbomb of 2010

looking-north
Until early yesterday morning, I was pretty certain that I wasn’t going to be chasing yesterday’s squall line associated with the record-breaking low pressure system that’s moving across the Great Lakes. With storms ripping along at 60 knots, what kind of chasing is a person going to do?

Then came the 7:00 a.m. phone call from my chase partner, Bill Oosterbaan, informing me that the Storm Prediction Center had issued a high risk for the area just across the border in Indiana and Ohio. With the rapidly advancing cold front still west of Chicago, we’d have ample time to position ourselves more optimally. This would be an early-day storm chase. It would also almost surely be our last chase for the next four or five months. What did we have to lose?

I hooked up with Bill at the gas station at 100th St. and US-131, and off we went. The storms had moved into Chicago by then, and as we dropped south, it became apparent that we would also need to break east and then stairstep down into Ohio, buying time in order to let the line develop with daytime heating. Satellite showed some clearing in Ohio,

transverse-rolls-along-i-94
suggesting a better chance for instability to build. Catching I-94 in Kalamazoo, we headed east toward I-75, with the Findlay area as our target.

Off to the northwest in Minnesota, the low was deepening toward an unprecedented sub-955 millibar level, sucking in winds from hundreds of miles around like the vortex in an enormous bathtub drain. Transverse rolls of stratocumulus streamed overhead toward the north, indicating substantial wind shear. (Click on image to enlarge.)

By the time we crossed the border into Ohio, tornado reports were already coming in from the west as the squall line intensified. Soon much of the line was tornado warned. However, while the warnings were no doubt a godsend for a few communities that sustained tornado damage yesterday, they weren’t much help to Bill and me. Chasing a squall line is different from chasing discrete supercells.

We had in fact hoped that a few discrete cells would fire ahead of the line. But the forecast CAPE never materialized to make that happen, and we were left with just the line. In that widely forced environment, tornadoes were likely to occur as quick, rain-wrapped spinups rather than as the products of long-lived mesocyclones. Even with GR3, the likelihood of our intercepting a tornado would require a high degree of luck. It was harder to identify areas of circulation with certainty; I found myself using base velocity as much as storm relative velocity on the radar, and comparing suspect areas not with easy-to-see hook echoes in the reflectivity mode, but with kinks in the line. It was pretty much a game of meteorological “Pin the Tail on the Donkey.”

squall-line-n-of-kenton-oh1
North of Kenton, we headed west and got our first view of the squall line. For all the hooplah that had preceded the thing, it didn’t appear very impressive. Just your average storm front–much windier than most, but also a bit anemic-looking compared to some of the shelf clouds I’ve seen. Still, it was a lovely sight, watching those glowering clouds grope their way across the late-October farmlands.

.

flying-leaves
Neither of us was quite ready to end the chase, so with the storm rapidly closing in, we scrambled back into the car and stairstepped to the southeast in the hope of intercepting a likely-looking reflectivity knot that had gone tornado-warned. It was fun playing tag with the storm, driving through swirls of leaves spun up by the outflow. But there really wasn’t much incentive for us to continue the game indefinitely. Eventually we turned back west and drove into the mouth of the beast.

For a few minutes, we got socked with torrential rain and some impressive blasts of wind (and, I should add, absolutely no lightning or thunder whatever). Then it was over. Time to head home.

In Kenton, we grabbed dinner at a small restaurant. Then we headed toward Cridersville, 28 miles straight to the west next to I-75, where there had been a report of “major structural damage” from a tornado. The report was accurate. A small but effective tornado had torn through the community, uprooting and snapping off large trees, taking off roofs, and demolishing at least one garage that I could see. Of course we couldn’t get into the heart of the damage path, but a few passing glimpses suggested that some of the damage may have been fairly severe.

As I said at the beginning, this chase will likely have been my last of the year. I never know for sure until the snows fly, but it seems like a pretty safe bet that I won’t be heading out again after storms until March or April. It’s hard to call this chase a bust since our expectations weren’t all that high to begin with. Plus, tornadoes or no tornadoes, it was an opportunity to engage with a historical weather system. Like other significant weather events such as the Armistice Day Storm and the 1974 Super Outbreak, this one will be given a name in the annals of meteorology. Me, I’m calling it the Great Lakes Superbomb of 2010. In a number of ways, it hasn’t proved to be as impactful as was forecast, but it’s not over yet. And regardless, I’m glad I got the chance to get out and enjoy a final taste of synoptic mayhem.

October 27, 2010 by
Filed Under: Michigan, Nature, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Uncategorized, Weather Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,