Tory Farney's Weather Blog: Thoughts on the Recent Tornado Outbreak

Originally posted on ZoomRadar

The event the Storm Prediction Center had been warning people of since early last week struck with vengeance this weekend across the Plains. As of Monday evening a total of six people had lost their lives and many others had been injured. The outbreak could have been much worse though, both in terms of the number of tornadoes and losses. First let’s focus on the losses and why they could have been worse.

This was the first major tornado outbreak that has occurred where the National Weather Service was able to deploy their experimental, more strongly worded, tornado warnings for situations where tornadoes have been confirmed on the ground or are very evident on radar and therefore strong tornadoes. These warnings, along with the typical warnings, have been given much credit in the news these past couple days for keeping deaths and injuries to lower levels than they could have been. While it is likely that these new warnings helped, meteorologists also did a particular good job of issuing warnings when warranted during this event, as shown in the image below.

There is only one tornado report in the image above that appears to fall completely outside of a tornado warning. But even this incident was subsequently issued a tornado warning just a few minutes later. It also appears, by visual inspection, that a surprising amount of the tornado warnings issued will confirm when considering that only about one out of four tornado warnings typically confirms. Additionally, all but one tornado warning occurred inside the tornado watch boxes and this warning has no report with it so there may have actually been no tornado. The National Weather Service and the Storm Prediction Center did a great job of warning people when danger was possible and this definitely kept fatalities and injuries to a minimum.

That being said, losses could have been much higher despite the warnings. One particular storm that had a history of producing tornadoes moved into the southern Wichita area shortly after 10 pm local time. Out of all of the tornadoes on Saturday, this tornado arguably produced the highest concern as it approached the Wichita metro area. Not only was the tornado heading for a city of nearly 400,000 people but it was heading towards this city on a Saturday night when many events were occurring in the city. One event that came under scrutiny was a concert held at Intrust Bank Arena headlining country music singer Miranda Lambert. The event that brought in a crowd of about 6,000 people, according to reports, had to be suspended for about 45 minutes while the EF3 tornado passed just five miles to the southeast. Concert goers were told to remain in the bowl of the arena while the storm passed. If this storm would have had a slightly different path the results could have been devastating. The Wichita area had been under a Particularity Dangerous Situation (PDS) Tornado Watch since a little after 5 pm local time that evening which prompted some to question why the event was allowed to go on with the recent memory of last year’s Sugarland incident at the Indiana State Fair fresh in everyone’s minds. A key difference here however was that this most recent event was indoors and luckily the tornado missed the arena whereas the Indiana State Fair was hit directly by strong wind gusts which caused a stage collapse and seven fatalities.

In general, most of the tornadoes remained over rural areas on Saturday which helped keep the number affected by them to a minimum. Not every town was so lucky however. A tornado struck Woodward, OK shortly after midnight local time. The tornado sirens, according to reports, never sounded due to some error with the system which may have been caused by a lightning strike. While this was a very unfortunate incident, it is yet more proof that the technology behind tornado sirens is outdated and should not be relied on to serve as a source of warning in the event of a tornado. Meteorologists can only do so much when it comes to warning people and at some point it becomes the responsibility of citizens to make sure they have the necessary means to receive notifications of watches and warnings. This was the only tornado which produced fatalities from this outbreak and who knows what would have occurred if the sirens did sound that night.

So what about the outbreak itself, could it have been worse? The answer in my opinion is definitely, as many areas put under a high risk and/or tornado watches by the Storm Prediction Center saw no severe weather at all. The graphic below depicts the Day 1 Outlook from the Storm Prediction Center along with the reports received from Saturday and Saturday night. All together there were 135 tornado reports, 168 severe hail reports, and 76 severe wind reports.

You may notice that some areas highlighted as at risk in this image saw little or no severe weather on Saturday. First let’s focus on what happened, generally speaking. The day kicked off with supercells across the middle of the risk area which tracked across portions of Kansas and into parts of Nebraska. Farther north, line segments tended to dominate which actually pushed into Iowa and into Illinois. Later in the day more supercells formed across northwestern Oklahoma, Kansas, and parts of Nebraska which was then followed by a large line of storms which extended from Texas into Nebraska and continued pushing east throughout the night. Three areas that stick out to me that missed out on the severe weather are the southern portions of the risk area, the northern portions of the risk area, and lots of the eastern portions of the risk area. The southern portions suffered from a lack of forcing and despite having great parameters, storms would just not initialize over this area. The northern portion suffered from a completely different issue as early morning storms tended to restabilize the environment which hindered the ability for stronger storms to form later in the day. Lastly, the eastern portions just missed out on the main energy for the system which meant when storms finally arrived to these areas in the overnight, they were no longer severe. If some of these things would have turned out differently we could have seen a lot more tornado and severe weather reports on Saturday.

So will people remember this outbreak? Well, it is certainly an outbreak which will remain in the minds of people across the Plains for some time. However, due to the lack of widespread devastation and death, it is likely that a few years from now this outbreak will not be remembered as anything too significant from any other tornado outbreak. Unfortunately the human mind tends to only remember events which cause widespread loss and therefore it is likely this event will fade into the many other tornado outbreaks that have occurred in the past.

Regardless, the outbreak produced many tornadoes which were captured by many storm chasers and non storm chasers throughout the day. Below are some images which I captured on the ZoomRadar map on Saturday thanks to the SevereStudios Storm Chasers network.