Storm Reports

Astounding. Click each image for a larger file.

Read much more about the tornado via the Dodge City, KS National Weather Service Office full report that is posted here. It includes diagrams of all of the evening’s tornadoes and a brief summary:

Greensburg Tornado Rated EF-5 (updated May 22)

The First “5″ Rating on the new Enhanced-Fujita Scale
…and the first “5″ classification since May 3, 1999 when an F5 tornado ripped through Moore, Oklahoma.

This page is not complete…additional information will be available as time permits. Significant tornadoes tracked over the same areas on May 5th and distinguishing tracks from May 4th and May 5th has been difficult…along with the fact that extensive areal flooding has been occurring in the area of some of the tornado tracks. Below is an image from the Dodge City doppler radar velocity data showing the incredible rotational “tornado vortex signature” shortly before changing the town of Greensburg, Kansas forever (click image for more):

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Technorati Tags: Greensburg, Tornado

5:36pm CDT; July 13, 2006

While flying from Kansas City to Las Vegas (via Denver) on July 13th, we were fortunate enough to observe a couple of beautiful thunderstorms from about 40,000 feet. Having the window seat on the right side of the west-bound plane afforded me a beautiful view of a string of storms lined up along an E-W boundary drapped over northern Kansas and southern Nebraska:

Low resolution archived radar image from NCDC.
If you know where I can find a better quality image from July 13-14th, email me

Frontier Airlines even offers in-flight tracking from every seat: The small LCD screens offer up several channels of cable TV programming as well as a real-time graphical representation of the plane’s location, speed, and altitude:

Below are a couple more shots of the same cell in NE Kansas taken several minutes apart between 5:36 and 5:44pm CDT:

While 2″+ diameter hail pelted NE Lawrence and 0.82″ of rain fell over KTGX, we were treated to a spectacular light show for several hours on Sunday evening. All shots: 18mm, f/5.6 for 5 seconds. Click the first image for larger view (apparently only the first image of each post is able to be enlarged via clicking - I just realized this tonight after checking some older posts) (corrected 02/09/07).

My target for yesterday verified nicely even in my absence, with a number of tornado reports from just south of Beatrice, Nebraska in the late afternoon. Per the SPC Storm Reports for this date, there were three tornado reports between 2133 and 2152Z (4:33-4:52pm CDT) in Gage County, NE. Several chasers were on these storms and captured nice photographs and video that have already appeared on several media outlets. I would expect the Omaha/Valley NWS WFO to be putting out a preliminary storm assessment sometime Monday.
Here in KS, the show came a bit later. We spent the afternoon tree-shopping at a local greenhouse/nursery. After making our selections, we waited while the owners loaded our purchases into a truck for immediate delivery and it was then that I began to get a bit restless, observing a growing cell to our southwest(!). Upon arriving at home around 6pm, I immediately checked radar and confirmed that storms were now firing ahead of the dryline, forming a broken line along I-335 from Topeka SW to Emporia around 6:30pm. At this time, the storms were still 30-40 miles (and 1-1.5 hours) away from KTGX, yet a gorgeous anvil and its mammatus hung over KTGX for much of the early evening hours. Below is a photo of a swarm of gnats hanging out over the weather station…and oh yeah, some mammatus in the background at 6:25pm CDT:

One highlight of the pre-storm environment was the significant inflow from the SSE. Winds were blowing all afternoon, regularly sustained into the upper-20s to 30s, with gusts I’d estimate to the mid-40s. Similar conditions were observed from Topeka to Lawrence, with the Lawrence ASOS reporting a 51mph gust at 6:52pm CDT.

The storm finally pushed into Leavenworth county just before 8pm. KTGX was impacted by the storm at the southern end of a small sequence of cells. At 8:05pm, the only tornado report to come from the area was logged on the SPC storm reports, a brief touchdown 4 miles south of Tonganoxie at 8:05pm as reported by “broadcast media”. By this time, the rain was falling at rates easily exceeding 2″/hour here in KTGX and I dared not venture out of the house. Some minor hail was also included, although the headline was really the wind and the rain. A neighborhood weather station located on a rooftop just a few houses to our south that reports conditions online recorded a 69 mph wind gust during this time.

At 8:15pm, just as the wind and rain were beginning to subside as the cell slid to our NE, the KC NWS office issued a tornado warning for Wyandotte and southern Leavenworth counties (including KTGX). Since the sirens have not been fully functional this spring, the local police drove through local neighborhoods with sirens blaring while repeating the tornado warning text over their loudspeakers. At 8:16pm, I captured this image of a suspicious lowering of the cloud base directly to the south of our location:

No rapid rotation was evident, although upward motion and movement from W to E was apparent. I do not consider this feature to be any sort of funnel and whether or not it was the feature that was part of the tornado report from 11 minutes prior is unknown.

A total of 1.05″ of much-needed rain was recorded and a temp drop from near-80 to 56 degrees occurred during the storm, with temps rebounding into the mid 60s immediately following the storm’s passage as the southerly flow returned nearly immediately - the frontal passage had not yet occurred. Around 8:20pm, the core of the cell passed to our NE and was still growing (as shown in the photo at the top of this post).

By around 8:25pm, clear blue sky was visible to the west and south and a spectacular light show was in progress to the N and E with frequent anvil crawlers extending directly overhead. I played with the manual exposure settings on the new camera but wasn’t able to zero in on the appropriate settings until it was too late. But I know now for next time…

Well, in most respects*, this was one blown forecast. The much-anticipated spring snowstorm never materialized for the Kansas City region with only a dusting to two inches falling across the area. To the credit of forecasters across the region, this was a particularly difficult forecast from the start, with a strong low and models that were all over the place. The low was slated to undergo several transition periods, which it did in fact do, just not quite as forecast. Most notably, the surge of warm, dry air that intruded the middle layers of the atmosphere during the daylight hours Monday was stronger and more pronounced than any of the models had anticipated, right up until the RUC picked up on it only about 3-6 hours out. This dry slot was beautifully visible in the 24-hour water vapor loop. By that time, the seeds for a bust had been sewn: the forecast was out there, the snow had shut off, and the damage had (or hadn’t, depending on how you look at it) been done.

Water vapor image: 03/20/06 17:15Z

Secondly, the movement – the speed and the track – of the upper level low through KS did not come to fruition as anticipated. In both aspects, the models were not far off, but off by just enough to matter. In terms of speed, the upper level low stalled out in SW KS for about 6 hours midday Monday; a seemingly minor detail that was not anticipated by the GFS or NAM (or even the RUC in the short term). The GFS was the first to hint at this stall in its 12Z run, but even then it late in the game. Hindsight shows that this slowdown, while only barely indicated by the GFS, was a detail that should have served as a hint of what was to come. In analyzing model run after model run, as I did with this system, I normally pride myself in having a good grasp on the trend, the run-to-run changes. But in this case, it is clear that this trend was not given its proper recognition. The trend was nothing new either: even going back 5-7 days when the storm system first came into the sights of the models, it was progged to be a Sunday/Monday event – a full 24-36 hours earlier than what would eventually verify. Not only did this slowdown displace a good deal of the moisture westward, it also served to wrap around a nice vort max that helped zap the dynamics through the NE KS, NW MO area, thus further decreasing the significant snowfall potential for this area.

By the time the upper level low started moving again late in the afternoon Monday, it tracked slightly farther north than had been anticipated, placing the highest snowfall totals north of the KC area, in a swath from north-central KS through SC and EC Nebraska and even into Central IA. Widespread reports of 25”+ were common through central NE, forcing the closure of hundreds of miles of I-80, not to mention the closures of schools, businesses, and the rest of the usual impacts a massive snowstorm of this scale will bring.

*: One aspect of this storm that verified relatively well was the QPF: Here in KTGX, a total of 1.13” of liquid equivalent fell between Sunday morning and Tuesday morning. As early as Thursday, significant precipitation was forecast, with a 1-1.5” QPF forecast given on Saturday. While this isn’t the headline making news (in fact, this aspect has gotten virtually no media attention through Tuesday morning), it is certainly a headline with respect to the looming drought for this region. Additionally, as hinted at by the forecasts, some borderline-convective sleet showers did verify yesterday afternoon, dropping a couple tenths of an inch of sleet at a time in a series of short, pronounced bursts each lasting 4-6 minutes. Over 0.4” of liquid equivalent was received in a relatively short window Monday afternoon (~2-5pm) which included several of these bursts.