This is topic Three times this summer - a new record for us in forum Member forum at The New Huntmastersbbs!.
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Posted by Cdog911 (Member # 7) on July 06, 2009, 07:02 AM:
Friday night found us (well, most of "us") cowering in the basement like wussies for the third time this summer from tornadoes. That's the most we've had to run for several years. Damned global warming! We get these storms when the temperatures are normal for this time of the year, then a COLD front moves in and starts stirring up all this shit. IT'S THE GLOBAL COOLING, YOU DUMBASSES!!!!! (Just in case Algore lurks on this site.)
The first time was in mid-May. Sunday afternoon. Storm brewed up. Called my son and told him to get home. Got dark enough that the street lights came on. What first looked like straight line winds through the bay window in front of the house quickly began sucking stuff off the ground, then the waist-high grass in the field behind my house was laid flat toward the east, then the south then the west as it passed overhead. I no more then told my son to get underground when the weather radios went off and they issued the warning for a possible tornado just NE of Abilene (I live on the NE corner of town.)
Oops.
The second time was a couple weeks ago. Evening. No sirens, but it dropped several funnels just east of us again. I had everyone in the basement when I saw it approaching on radar. I don't take chances. Well, mostly everyone. The neighbor lady is a nervous sort and she drives me bug nuts on a good day. Put her in a life-threatening situation and she's damn near intolerable.
Friday night, about 8:30, they issued a warning for the county west of us where our tornadoes come from (bastards!) and I started rounding up basement-less neighbors to get them into our basement. (People, kids and dogs everywhere! Yelling, worrying, barking. I need to do like my dad used to do - fire up the blenders. We had a warning once when my brother and I were out on strom watch and when we got back, they were all drunker than hell from the Ameretto sours they'd been downing since they got to the shelter. LOL)
By 8:45, it was as dark as the proverbial well digger's asshole and the rain and winds were "impressive". Raining in sheets. My sister texted me from McPherson, KS where, just a week ago, they'd been run into the basement by a mile-wide tornado that caused a car wreck that killed one and flooding, to tell me that my brother seven miles west of me was without power. When the storm cleared, I went to see if he needed any help and found them still in the dark, except for lightning and fireworks being shot overhead. Trees and limbs down everywhere. He said that he stepped out when Saline Co. was placed under a warning and, by then, the winds were blowing so hard there that it sounded like ghosts howling in the treetops. Like us, their new basement was full of neighbors and the power went out before they could sound the sirens. At sun up, they found a 300-foot radio tower on the ground, two old grain bins mangled and deposited on the high school football field from God knows where because know one knows where they came from, and one house with its roof peeled off.
Seeings as he was in charge of the Chapman tornado efforts as County Administrator and Director of Emergency Services Director, he was very relieved that nothing more happened then that.
Earthquakes and hurricanes are bad, but around here, tornadoes are a spectator sport. LOL
Posted by Leonard (Member # 2) on July 06, 2009, 09:23 AM:
Glad to hear that you dodged the bullet, Lance.
Yeah, we have the earthquakes, now and then and they are sometimes a little scary.
I remember a tornado when I was a boy in Minneapolis. How we ever got home that night, trees were down all over town. I mean, big elms, oaks and maples, just one of them could block half a city block.
But the main bonus for me was that the local golf course, just a block away was completely flooded for well over a year, (maybe two?) and became my personal wilderness area; wall to wall swamp. I had never seen a sea gull before that. I lived down there....sorta.
Good hunting. LB
Posted by Kokopelli (Member # 633) on July 06, 2009, 12:45 PM:
Ok....... Glad to hear that you've got sense enough to get underground instead of putting on Ruby Slippers and chasing twisters.
Question; Other than size & pucker factor, what is the difference between a tornado and a big dust devil??
Posted by onecoyote (Member # 129) on July 06, 2009, 01:54 PM:
Now I know how all the coyotes got back east. They all blew over there from Kansas. Maybe you ought to consider moving to Nevada, not much happens here.
Good to hear you made it through the chaos.
Posted by Cdog911 (Member # 7) on July 06, 2009, 03:11 PM:
Kokopelli, totally different weather phenomena. I believe a dust devil is formed by swirling air convecting off the surface of the ground. The dust devil forms from the ground up and only extends a couple hundred feet into the air from the ground, at the very worst.
Tornadoes are formed by cool air overlapping warm air over a large area. The warm air starts to cool the cool air beneath it causing it to rise. At the same time, on the trailing end, the moisture in the air begins to cool and causes the upper air mass the sink. The combination of the two form a slowly rotating drum of air that gains momentum and soon, begins to result in rotation. The end of that rotation then begins to drop and forms the classic funnel shape. Once the funnel touches the ground and forms a debris cloud, it officially becomes a tornado.
Dust devils produce some wind - maybe 30-40 mph right next to the vortex and are generally only a few feet across. Tornadoes are rated on the Enhanced Fujita scale for an EF-# rating. The Chapman tornado that hit near me just over a year ago was an EF-3 tornado with winds of around 135 mph, if I recall correctly. Could be off on that number. It went through the middle of Chapman, had a base at ground level of ~200 feet wide and a debris cloud of well over a half-mile wide, damaged or destroyed 269 homes (~1/3 of the town) and caused ~80 million dollars in damage.
The Greensburg, KS tornado by comparison was the first EF-5 tornado following the upgrading of the rating system from simply the Fujita scale to the Enhanced Fujita scale. It had sustained winds of over 250 mph with maximum winds in excess of 300 mph. Its base at ground level was a half-mile wide with a debris cloud wider than a mile and moved so slowly that it was over the city of Greensburg for a documented twelve minutes destroying 95% of the town. Most every lawn in Greensburg was completely stripped of vegetation, including every blade of grass.
Rarely, if ever, does the horizontal cylinder from which a tornado forms become visible. In all my years of storm spotter training for FD, we were basically told that this is something that happens, but isn't seen. Fifteen years ago, before digital videos became commonplace, there was an F-1 tornado about 7 miles from my house. It began as a rope tornado, as opposed to a wedge tornado, and really never grew beyond that. What was very exciting to the meteorologists in the area was that a horizontal roll of rotating clouds nearly thirty miles long drooped down below the base of the clouds like the blades on a wood planer stick up from the table top, and at the end of it all, this little twister fell out and hit the ground.
When this tornado began, two friends of mine were just leaving a pasture where they'd been fishing. They saw the dark cloud overhead and noted the rotating base. Not realizing that it had already dropped a rotating column that just hadn't formed because it hadn't sucked debris into it enough for it to become visible, they pulled out of the gate just in time to see the treeline a half-mile from them explode. They both floored their trucks and the guy bringing up the rear looked in his rear view mirror in time to see the wooden gate at the pasture entrance explode.
Oh yeah, before I forget, Koko, tornadoes form in the clouds and go to the ground rather than from the ground up. Most thunderstorms require a storm cell of 35,000 feet height to produce the kind of conditions that will produce a tornado. The bigger storms around here will go well above 55 - 70,000 feet, creating supercells, wall clouds, and big messes.
When Chapman got hit last year, I watched the hook echo - a radar signature showing clouds being drawn into the vortex - on a real-time satellite site online. It passed ~3 miles south of my house trekking ENE toward Chapman 12 miles east of me. When it crossed an intersection of two blacktops about 7 miles east, a buddy of mine, his fiance and his grandfather were beating feet the hell out of there in his Chevy pickup. Luckily for them, it raised up long enough to pass directly over them, also avoiding two nearby houses. Not having undergone spotter training, he drove like hell for Chapman for the community storm shelter there, unaware that he was paralleling the tornado to the south of the highway. When he got to the shelter, he nosed his truck up against the north side of the building just as the tornado struck from the SW. The back window of his pickup blew out and he and his grandfather held onto his fiance's hands - she was in the back seat - as the tornado tried to suck her out the window. For more than a week, she had black bruises around her waist line from the seatbelts holding her down. After the tornado passed, the radar signature showed a big purple bullseye which the NWS siad was all the debris in Chapman, thousands of feet into the air. They never did find the announcer's booth off the football stadium. LOL
As far as how far a tornado can venture from its source cloud, Saturday night, television Doppler radar pinpointed the rotation in the clouds three miles SE of my hometown, Solomon, Kansas (5 miles WSW of Abilene, moving E). At that time, the actual tornado at ground level caused damage on the NW corner of Solomon, a distance of 3.5 miles away. Thus, if you're ever in a place where the weather guys are saying a tornadic supercell shows rotation within, say, 5 miles of where you are, you're far from out of the woods. Even the big wedge tornadoes will localize the damage to within a few hundred feet of the base of the column, but that column can swing back and forth beneath those clouds in a swath several miles wide.
As far as taking shelter from them, nah. I'm just like any Kansan - cameras, camcorders, Etchasketch. Whatever you can find to capture the moment. I used to chase them and damn near got myself killed twice in one season. Lisa even went with me once and when we got backbuilt in and over by a bad storm (no tornado), the rain stopped and my pickup had been scooted and skidded several hundred feet cross a field. Not a week later, we waited one out in a car wash watching trash dumpsters roll down the street with walls of water and rain. The wind actually picked my truck up and sat it back down. That was the end of her storm chasing days. She keeps me at home now. ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
Posted by TRnCO (Member # 690) on July 06, 2009, 06:25 PM:
Colorado is holding it's own for tornado count this year too. In a 10 day strecth in June, there were a documented 17 tornados in eastern CO. There were two more yesterday. None closer than about 10 or 12 miles from my place, but my wife and I did get pictures of one of many funnel clouds that have been spotted, but the one we got pics. of was already east of us and never touched down, meaning no harm could've come.
Some guy in Aurora, CO. got sucked up by a tornado earlier this spring. Dumb shit was out taken' pics. of it, and it got'em! He lived to tell about it.
I wish dumbass selection for death was better around here, because I'd say he qualified! ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
Posted by Cdog911 (Member # 7) on July 06, 2009, 06:39 PM:
Always get west of them. ALWAYS. LOL
I guess that KS had the most of any state last year and the Chapman tornado was the biggest of the lot. If I recall, the largest outbreak we had, as far as single day, was somewhere in the neighborhood of 43, May 5, 2007 (Greensburg). The number may actually be higher, but I recall it was an insanely high figure.
Damned Algore.
Posted by Kokopelli (Member # 633) on July 06, 2009, 08:19 PM:
CDog; Good info!!!! Thanx!!
I had enough of tornados when I lived in S. Mich. I'll take today's 103° temps & the dust devils that we have here instead.
Posted by Patterson (Member # 3304) on July 07, 2009, 07:36 AM:
Cdog911,
I was actually in a bar called the Tropics in Milford when that storm came through friday night. The place was packed and we lost power right when it hit. Not like they could really kick anybody out so everyone stayed and kept drinking in the dark. Pretty nasty storm. I moved out here the day after the Chapman/Manhattan tornado last year. Pretty eye opening.
TRnCO,
I am a Colorado native, just moved to Kansas last June. I cant believe how many tornadoes and storms that you guys have been getting!! I lived in Fort Collins when the Windsor tornado hit but this year is just insane. I get calls from my buddies all the time about the weather. I kinda like big storms and if figures right when I leave Colorado it starts to get back to the way it used to be with storms every afternoon.
Posted by Leonard (Member # 2) on July 07, 2009, 11:33 AM:
Last year, flying out of Denver on Labor Day weekend, there was some kind of huge tornado that disrupted the whole area and then The plane couldn't land at Rapid City, SD and turned around and went back to Denver where I spent the night sleeping on the floor.
On the return flight a week later, we were diverted to Colorado Springs, sitting on the tarmac for an hour until Denver opened up, at which point we flew up to Denver at treetop level the whole way. That white tent terminal looks stupid, if you ask me?
My impression is that Denver has quirky weather, or was I just lucky?
Good hunting. LB
Posted by Patterson (Member # 3304) on July 08, 2009, 11:19 AM:
You were pretty lucky. It not very often that CO has a ton of delays. Your experience is about the worst I have heard. You might run into a 2-3 foot snow storm that will block things up for a few days but most times the weather comes and goes pretty quickly. "If you dont like the weather wait five minutes" a lot of people claim that saying but the front range of Colorado its pretty darn accurate. Most the systems build right at the mountains and then move east. They build fast and if your within 20 or so miles of the foothills you dont have much time. Then there are the fall and spring snows...........70+ degrees one day and 20 and blizard the next. I would say for the most part just "lucky" Leonard.
Sleeping in the airport sucks.
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