CheeselandSkies

Storm total death toll of 32 for Michael includes about half from the precursor disturbance causing flooding over Central America.

Hurricane and land-based severe convective weather/tornado chasing are rather different animals. Tornadoes develop on much shorter timescales and may not always develop, even from a seemingly intense supercell in favorable conditions. With hurricane chasing, you know you're going to have a storm. With tornadoes, they and their parent supercells haven't formed yet when you make your target. You don't have days of modeling their potential tracks, they can take sudden turns (See: El Reno) but more often than not move with the parent supercells. The objective of tornado chasing usually isn't to put yourself in the core of strongest winds, unless you're in a vehicle like the TIV or Dominator (Again, see: El Reno). With tornadoes, you don't have to contend with surge, and you usually don't run the risk of being trapped in a disaster area for potentially several days, with blocked roads, no power, and no open gas stations for 50 miles in any direction.

I'll say it again, no Cat 2 has a perfectly formed stadium eye fully surrounded by deep convection, WMG eye temp on Dvorak, and produces the kind of "white-out" video footage coming out of Michael. Looks very comparable to other high-end 4 landfalls of recent years such as Maria and Patricia. Oh, and I suppose Cat 2s have pressure in the 920s (not even at the center of the eye) and impress guys like Josh and other chasers who have been in some of the strongest landfalls of the decade. ...but I suspect these are the kind of folks who aren't going to be convinced by data, so I'm wasting my digital breath.

Palm City? When I type that in Google Maps it takes me to a spot on the southern peninsula east of Lake Okeechobee. No way Michael affected that area.

I'm sure *most* posters are well aware of this, but no Cat 2 has a perfectly formed stadium eye at and even for an hour after landfall. Even 4-5 hours after landfall the CDO and banding structure were pretty much intact. Michael was in rare territory for US landfalls, let alone N. Gulf Coast ones. Not one sign of CDO erosion by dry air intrusion for a few hours before landfall as was seen with Irma, Ivan, Katrina and many others.

Poplar Grove-Harvard tornado of January 7, 2008. Crazy thing was the train was in motion at the time. https://www.weather.gov/lot/07Jan2008_tornado That Timmer video though...some of the most intense daytime "whiteout" footage from a CONUS landfall in the HD era. Basically what Irma would have been had it not gone into Cuba. You can hear what Warren Faidley called the "Devil's scream" in the chapter about Andrew in his book.

That to me looks like exactly what I imagined damage from a landfalling high-end major (140+) to look like in an area without mostly concrete buildings like for Irma in the Islands or Maria (at Palmas Del Mar) - like a 10 mile wide, 2-hour-long EF2-3 tornado went through.

Although it pales in comparison to all the excitement with Michael, I went on a spur-of-the-moment chase yesterday afternoon and got on the little cell near Arena/Spring Green, WI just as it was tornado-warned. The updraft tower and striated base can be seen in this video from my dash-mounted GoPro. A few scans showed a bit of a couplet but there was nothing confirmed from it.

Meanwhile downgraded here in WI despite more sunshine than I thought this AM...nearly overcast now though. It smells like spring outside which feels very strange with the trees beginning to turn. HRRR is bouncing around like mad every hour with the location of potential discrete rotating cells in S. WI, but what it does tell me is I need to keep a close watch on radar trends later this afternoon.

Things have overachieved a bit this morning with that QLCS in central OK.

Cuba.

Quite a bit more sunshine than I expected around here this morning. Clouds off to the west also have that "convectivey" look - not too common in October around these parts.

With the rivers and lakes around the upper Midwest already as swollen as they are, I'm getting nervous for what's going to happen next spring if we get a lot of snow this coming winter.

https://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/md/md1519.html LOL, guess this was the other 20 percent. 3 more months...

MD now out saying watch incoming for southern WI. Things finally look to be firing off around the Twin Cities. That earlier cluster that produced some hail in NC WI I suspect was elevated. Problem is there's less than an hour of daylight left. We shall see but I suspected SPC's strong wording was once again overblown given the lack of CAM support, and I haven't seen anything yet to shake that suspicion.