TornadoVideos.net
If you are a tornado enthusiast like myself, you will probably not even read the rest of the blog post but instead watch the video over and over again.
The Storm Prediction Center put out a severe weather outlook for yesterday's severe weather. They were forecasting that severe storms would occur in the area shaded in yellow.
This map shows the probability of tornadoes occurring. This hatching indicates the probability of an EF2-EF5 tornado occurring within the designated area. Now in my years chasing, it is very rare that the Storm Prediction Center denotes hatching on a certain area of the map within close proximity to the time of storm initiation. Weather nerds, like myself, get very excited for this because this shows that the Storm Prediction Center is very confident with their forecast of a strong tornado.
Even though snow was to be forecasted at my desk yesterday, I could not help but to get excited about forecasting these tornadoes. There were signs of a severe weather outbreak since last weeks model runs. It was like the feeling of Christmas morning when you know there are presents under the tree but you do not know for certain of just what is under the wrapping paper... And if we want to go with the theme of Christmas, Mother Nature was sure to fill Santa's role perfectly.
To keep the variables simple for the non-weather folk, there was enough moisture, energy (2500 J/kg), and instability ahead of the front to produce some major storms.
All morning long was a waiting game, but around 1:30 PM, storms started to fire. The area of convection seen on this visible satellite shows the overshooting tops of the thunderstorms. If you look close enough, you can see the agitated cumulus clouds within range of those popping thunderstorms.
About 15 minutes later is when these storms started to appear on radar. Once these storms started to mature, they rapidly moved northeast.
This particular cell was the one to be watched for the rest of the evening. As it crosses the boarder into Oklahoma, a hook was visible on radar and the intensity within the storm started to increase.
As you can see, the cell west of Lawton was not the only storm that was worth watching. Storms continued to fire throughout the rest of the night with tornado warnings lasting until early this morning.
While radar is impressive to some, these photographs of the tornadoes taken by James G. LaDue are much more enjoyable.
James G. LaDue
James G. LaDue
James G. LaDue
As if Oklahoma was not stirred up enough by storms yesterday, a magnitude 3.6 earthquake shook the state last night. This followed the magnitude 4.7 and 5.6 earthquakes that happened Saturday. Not the nicest year for Oklahoma, but the state did set a lot of other weather records as shown by the National Weather Service here.
Do you think Oklahoma had today off?
Radar from 11/8/2011
Nope. When it rains, it pours...
~Meteorologist Heather Brinkmann
No comments:
Post a Comment