We are finally getting some warmer air in the great lakes region. It has been a while since we have gotten some summerlike temperatures. One of the things that happens when we get the warmer weather at this time of year, we get dust devils. The American Meterological Society defines a dust devil thusly, Dust devils are best developed on a hot, calm afternoon with clear skies, in a dry region when intense surface heating causes a very steep lapse rate of temperature in the lowest 100 m of the atmosphere.
In English, the air just above the ground heats up fast and rises and begins rotating. At spots where the low air heats up and rises fastest, it creates a hole through the cold air, and more hot air fills in. They are especially visible in the late spring because the farm fields have just been plowed up creating a dark surface that heats the surface air quickly. Then the loose dirt is easily picked up by the swirling winds, making the vortex visible. Add a little wind and these things move across the fields like a mini tornado.
They are usually quite harmless, but there have been some circumstances where they have caused some damage and created some havoc. This dust devil at the Rose Bowl this last year caused some real problems and 4 people got hurt.
I was actually stuck by one while driving one time and it moved my car over a lane and sucked my hat off my head and out the window. Wish I had that one on video. I did catch a couple small dust devils Saturday May 2nd out in some farm fields.
Here is a simple graphic to help visually show what is happening with a dust devil. They don't usually last very long and often only go up about 100 feet. Some can get rather big though with multiple vorticies. The wind speeds can be up to 60mph which is enough to do damage when in an area with loose objects. Often, as in my video, the only thing disturbed was the dirt and some corn leaves left over from the last harvest.
This last week has had a major weather anniversary for the weather enthusiast, and a scary memory for quite a few middle aged folks. On April 3rd & 4th, 1974; 148 tornadoes ripped across much of the heartland of America, bringing death and destruction. 315 people died that day and thousands more were injured. Billions of dollars in property was leveled. It has since been dubbed the super outbreak. Nobody was prepared for it or expected it, but by the end of it, it would change the course of weather forecasting forever.
Back in those days, we did not have all of the sophisticated equipment or the super computers that we have today. We did not have all the satellites in the sky either. We were pretty much flying blind. While there had been some research done on tornadoes, they were still very mysterious and no one really had a clue about their formation, or the conditions that caused them to form. The radar being used was designed to spot enemy planes, not tornadoes. The teletype machines could not type out all the warnings fast enough, nor could it prioritize tornado warnings over other forecasts. As a result, warnings would go out after the fact. These days changes all of that.
As a result of the massive loss of life and property, many pressed the government to take action. Funding for the national weather service increased. Grants to the scientific study of weather increased. Scientists began going out into the field to study severe weather and tornadoes by observation. NASA was involved in the effort putting satellites into orbit to monitor and measure the weather from space. Computer companies lent their expertise to come up with more powerful computers to help predict, forecast, and warn the public. An all out effort was made by all that in the last 40 years that has changed lead time from being after the fact to sometimes knowing days in advance of severe weather outbreaks and actual lead times in warnings of 20 minutes or more.
In April of 2011, on the 25th through the 28th, all of the learning and knowledge; all of the advancements in technology got put to the test. Days in advance, computer modeling was showing that another super outbreak was about to occur. It was one that would eclipse the 1974 record outbreak. Over those 3 days there were 358 confirmed tornadoes across 21 US states. There were 211 alone on the 27th. 324 people died as a result of those tornadoes. While this is close to the same as 1974, the number of tornadoes was double. We should have expected going on 800. The 2011 storms seemed to hit much more populated areas as compared to 1974 as well.
All of the technology worked. All of the years of study and effort did pay off. Lives were saved as a result. There is still a lot we don't know about tornadoes. Today we have an armada of researchers out there still trying to collect data that will help us further decode the tornado. Some day it is hoped that we will be able to tell the difference between which storms only produce small tornadoes, and which ones will go on to produce those killer, massive EF 4s and 5s.
This was the lead story last weekend. A tornado outbreak strikes the midwest and Great Lakes region. 81 reports of tornadoes in 6 states damaging dozens of town and leveling several. Also hundreds of reports of severe wind and hail we recieved causing sporadic damage and power outages over hundreds of miles. In Illinois there were 2 F4 tornadoes, the first time such large tornadoes had struck the state in November since records have been kept.
As early as the previous Wednesday and Thursday, there was talk of a severe weather event coming together in that region. The storm prediction center even put out a graphic 4 days in advance for severe potential. As we got into Friday and Saturday, the potential for severe weather became more and more sure, and also more and more ominous. All the ingredients seemed to be coming together for a major tornado outbreak. It became so sure by Saturday that a High risk area was posted, which is a rare event. On Sunday morning they expanded the risk areas a bit. Anybody who was into weather knew... this was a seriously dangerous situation about to unfold.
All the ingredients were there, a strong low pressure system creating lots of wind, moisture flowing in from the south, a strong jet stream flying overhead from the west creating crosswinds at different heights in the air. Along with the moisture you had enough warmth at the surface and cold air aloft. The cold front coming off the low was bowed a bit forward rather than dragging behind with a sharp contrast in temperatures and wind direction. It wasn't a matter of if, but when would they begin to fire.
By 9am the storms had already begun to fire. There was a line in N IL near Rockford, and SW of Peoria some more storms had just formed. There were a couple of tornado warnings on the north storms for spotted funnel clouds, but they were soon robbed of energy by the southern storms as they developed. At 11:55am the first confirmed tornado was spotted by Pekin IL, just south of Peoria. It did some damage and moved on to East Peoria by 12:00pm and damaged up to 80 homes there. The storm intensified more before it moved into Washington by 12:05, a full blown F4 tornado that you saw at the open of the blog. As time moved on, more storms developed and more tornadoes formed and towns hit. It was truly a scary afternoon.
I was already on the road by the time the first torndao reports started coming in. The first tornado was on the ground for 46 miles and lasted 41 minutes (notice the speed? over 60mph). It lifted at about 12:36 or shortly thereafter. Very shortly after that I was arriving at Morris on the NE corner of the storm. All kinds of debris was raining down from the sky. Mostly it was construction material; insulation, shingles, little bits of wood. I knew something bad had happened, and that also I was not in a good location. It seemed to take forever to get out of there as there was traffic lights to work through and I got them all red and thinking, there is a tornado coming at me and I am stuck at this light.
I proceeded east to stay ahead of the storm, also hoping I could work into a good location. Then the storm began dropping new tornadoes. Braidwood, Coal City, Wilmington, Manhattan, then Frankfort. Each time the reports were moving NE and I was on a direct collision course with the tornado. I knew I was in the slot, with rains to my north and ominous steep rising clouds to my SW. The tornado I knew was just behind the feature to my SW, being abscured by rain from my view. The whole time I heard the sound of tornado sirens blaring into the afternoon sky. I just couldn't make any progress against this fast moving storm. I finally had to bail as traffic had become too slow to outrun the storm and I did not want to be stuck in my car if it hit. Good thing too. The map I am looking at shows the last report only 2 km to my south. How many miles is a km? That was at 2pm in Frankfort.
Upon my return home, I stopped back and checked out some of the debris that had fallen. Mostly it was construction material. I found a fragment of a hand written note and a piece of a bill from 1991. About 40 miles from Washington I found a piece of wall board about 3ft square. Hard to imagine that frisbeeing for 40 miles, but there it was. There was also a lot of sporadic damage from non tornadic winds; trees down, power poles snapped, garbage cans and such strewn about. It was also on my way home I began to hear the reports of what I already had known from the falling debris. Towns had been hit and severely damaged by tornadoes.
One of the oddities of the tornadoes that day was there seemingly targeting places named Washington. There was the town of Washington IL that was severely damaged by an F4, and further downstate another F4 struck Washington county. AND, the town of Washington Indiana was hit by a tornado also.
My prayers go out to those affected, and calls go out again for assistance to anyone within my reach. If you give cash to the Red Cross, you can designate it to be for tornado relief. I have to hand it to the communities though. They have very quickly sprung into action with their emergency plans they had in place and the relief efforts so far have been very organized and quick. Kudos to the communities, and the surrounding communities and businesses who have all pitched in to help. I hope it has been like that in all the communities hit Sunday. There were many.
Big News Friday night was the coverage of tornadoes in the Oklahoma city area once again. A tornado emergency was declared and multiple tornadoes were reported in the area, as well as large hail, and as much as a foot of rain. It was a really horrid situation in an area already massively hit in the last two weeks.
Another issue was exposed Friday, and one that has bothered me for a few years now. This is the problem of the new storm chasers. Since the program Storm chasers aired and became popular, we have seen an explosion in the number of people who storm chase. It has gone from something a few weather geeks like myself and a few scientists do, to a mainstream extreme sport.
The chasers today are a different breed. They make group names for themselves, paint their vehicles up in fancy paint jobs with all kinds of lights and instruments, kind of a pimp my ride for weather geeks. The attitudes are not of sober concern, but of wild excitement, screaming like little girls while hanging out car windows. They disregard traffic laws and ignore law enforcement. Rather than being concerned with safety and reporting for the public, they are all out to be the one to get the great shot that will make the TV news and to be famous and rich.
This bravado has underestimated the danger involved and I think a sense that their own skills were superior enough to toy with death and walk away unscathed time after time. While no one died today, a number of these chasers got caught in today's tornadoes and nearly lost their lives in the process. It just emphasizes the exact thing that I had been concerned about for a long time. The Weather channel crew amazing survived relatively unscathed after being thrown across a field the length of two football field, crushing their vehicle. Other chasers were reporting damages to their vehicles and injuries to themselves, thankfully nothing too serious.
I've seen these guys clog roads, disobey traffic laws, argue with authorities, block emergency personnel, and behave like idiots. They park in the roadways, speed past other vehicles, stand in the roadways, block off streets, cut off drivers, and other such dangerous behaviors. They can turn and empty rural road into a bumper to bumper traffic jam in minutes. Once I came around a blind curve to find a tornado chasing tour group scattered about the road. Had I not been following the speed limit, it would have been disaster.
Something has to be done to curb this dangerous behavior. I am not sure exactly what the answer is and how to weed out the good safe and serious chasers and researchers from the yahoos, glory seekers, profiteers, egomaniacs, and ignorant. How do we reign in the madness in such a serious and dangerous activity?
In this video, the chasers got too close to the storm and the tornado did some unpredictable things, leaving them in a deadly drive for their lives. They should have been farther off to begin with and this could have been avoided. Instead, in the hunt for glory and money, they nearly lost their lives.
In this video the same thing happens and in their attempt to get away
were nearly impaled by flying debris. they never should have been in
this position.
In this shot, we see The Weather Channel crew making some poor decisions that nearly got them killed as their vehicle was thrown across a field the length of two football fields, tumbling and rolling, crushing their vehicle, and somehow escaping practically unscathed.
This is a video of what happened as a result of bad advice by members of the weather media who told people to escape the oncoming tornadoes by driving south. This advice clogged roadways and made people sitting ducks in metal coffins unable to do anything about it. Those on the local media and at the weather channel who propose this should be fired immediately. 50 people were injured and 5 dead, almost all in vehicles.
I remember having a hat my Dad gave me from his job. On it were the words, safety pays in many ways. That is a motto that many of today's chasers need to learn. Another saying is this, discretion is the better part of valor.
Headed out when I saw some storms firing up Near Galseburg IL. I
figured I would intercept them along I39 south of I80. That I did as I
Caught up with them at about the Il river. I managed to cut my way
through the core and out on the south side at about Wenona. Had some
interesting circulations there. At that point the storms were just
organizing themselves into a line of severe storms so I did not really
experience anything too severe, but I did get, a Good shelf cloud, maybe
wall, some lightning, and some areas of flash flooding.
This
was my first serious run for my new Canon HF G10 camcorder and it seemed
to operate rather well. The manual focus was great to keep shots in
focus. The manual white balance as well was very handy for keeping high
contrast shots from being too light or dark. I am sure as I learn the
manual functions better, I will be able to capture much better video
than I had been.
