CheeselandSkies

Has to be getting ready to do it, just south of Mart:

Didn't realize this until reading through NWS Chicago's summary page today, but apparently the Woodhaven Lakes campground near Amboy/Sublette, IL was hit by an EF2 on March 31st, same as they were on June 22, 2015 (same day as the Coal City-Braidwood EF3).

Frame grab from my video looking toward the totally rain-wrapped 2015 tornado (small consolation for me at the time for missing Rochelle 2 months earlier).
 

Let's not.

Up to slight risk/5% prob. Cloud breaks showing up in southwest Wisconsin.

Getting some decent filtered sunshine in Madison early this morning. That big area of rain pushing through IA is a problem for late afternoon supercells, though. Action of the day might be if enough instability builds to allow the leading edge of that to intensify.

42 minutes ago, ct_yankee said:

This storm's entire life has been filled with weirdness, mesocyclonically speaking. The cell splitting in two and then having the two mesos dance the Fujiwara before actually recombining back to a single cell is just par for the course, and also totally insane. Watched the whole development on radar from far far away, unfortunately... But what a storm - simply amazing evolution.

 

It's like Grand Island's Night of the Twisters for central Oklahoma.

5 hours ago, Geoboy645 said:

And the crests continue to go up and up on the Mississippi. ARX is now expecting at least April 2019 level crests along its entire stretch of the river, with some gauges nearing 2001 levels. For instance, McGregor IA which is just across the river from Prairie Du Chien is expected to reach a top 3 crest on record. Only behind 1965 and 2001. La Crosse is forecasted for a top 5 crest behind those years and 1952 and 1969. Governor Evers has declared a state of emergency already for the flooding. And the rain the next two days, which could be as much as 2 inches in spots including the areas that just got 10"+ of snow two days ago, is going to make things even worse. Especially south of the Black River. It's not just up there though. Dubuque is forecasted at least to 22ft, with that number almost certainly increasing as the crest becomes in view of the forecast period. And even as far as south as Davenport, which is already forecasted at 18.2 ft, which is major flooding. And that is with the crest potentially being 10 days out yet and a continued wet pattern for the forseeable future. 2023 is already shaping up to be a renowned flooding year on the Mississippi, and we've barely started this.

P.S: I know that I have been basically the only one posting anything in this thread, but I really don't care. This is too major of a event to be not talked about. If a random snowstorm in January can get incessantly talked about for days and days, this should be too. 

Surprising to me that the leaders at PdC are 1965 and 2001, and La Crosse those years and 1952/69. In my mind 1993 and 2008 are the benchmarks of major river flooding in the upper Midwest, particularly the Mississippi.

Disgusting.

The biggest issue with 4/19 and 4/20 is wave timing. The primary wave is a bit too far west on 4/19, which would still be workable in W IA, but most models have a shortwave traverse the area the morning of 4/19 which veers the LLJ off to the east with it. That leaves us with 4/20 which has the primary wave ejecting, but probably a bit too quickly to maximize the risk. The Euro's solution is almost good, with primed soundings at 18z across SE IA and W IL, but the wind fields again veer out later in the day and a strongly forced cold front surges east as the wave closes off aloft, doesn't exactly scream visible tornadoes to me. Could see either one of these trending into a somewhat decent local day, but it's difficult to say which one is the better of the two at the moment. 

1 hour ago, cyclone77 said:

Thursday system looks pretty interesting.  A strong warm front is gonna bisect the DVN/LOT cwas.  Looks like one of those days where it'll be stuck in the 40s at Dubuque all day, while southeast IA basks in the tropical 70s with a severe threat.  SPC (Broyles lol)  has a risk way south in southern MO/AR, but will likely need to be expanded much further north in later outlooks.

Yeah, I was looking at that on the 12Z GFS and thinking the same thing about SPC's outlook. It's odd because I thought the knock on Broyles was that he's almost always excessively bullish on severe potential.

The main caveat is if the low is occluding/weakening by the time it gets into the region Thursday afternoon/evening which looks like a possibility. However the GFS still has it at 994 MB at 21Z Thursday with the warm front well up into WI (probably too far north, as you mentioned). The think I like is it shows the left exit region of the 500mb jet punching out over the warm sector just ahead of the triple point, when with most setups it wants to linger behind the warm sector during peak heating. That in my mind is one of those synoptic-level red flags that if it's present, overrides a lot of other concerns like moisture, potential for mode issues, etc (3/31 being a major recent example).

@andyhb Exactly. There's been a lot more discussion/debate-sometimes-verging into trolling about this topic on the "other forum", but what exactly are we trying to accomplish here? Are we trying to rate tornadoes to determine how strong they get, how often, where, and when (which is what I once thought); or to prove...what, exactly about construction engineering around the USA?

Random SVR out for Dodge County, WI for a teensy little hailer.

8 minutes ago, Sciascia said:

LOT with a graphic showing how 3 of the 4 seasons will have a presence over the next 48hrs.

Sounds like your average April in the Midwest!

7 hours ago, RCNYILWX said:

To the supposed lack of EF-5s since Moore, if EF-5 were adjusted down to 190+ mph, we'd have seen the "normal" amount of EF-5s over the past 10 years. Particularly with that DI and DOD for houses.

As an NWS employee, I think that the agency as a whole has lost the plot when it comes to damage ratings. Having some reference to engineering standards is all well and good, but an impossible standard to reach EF-5 has been set based off building codes that don't exist in much of the country.

We've become fixated on finding everything a tornado didn't do as opposed to judging what a tornado did do with respect to totality of damage. If a large swath of a town has catastrophic destruction, it's not the town's fault if they don't have structures built to withstand >200 mph winds. The lower bound on the DIs is used too liberally imo.

Vilonia is an example less than a year after Moore of a tornado that by all accounts should have been rated EF-5. Prior to that, there's a good case to be made that Tuscaloosa 2011 should have been EF-5. On the flipside of that, it seems likely that the post-Moore survey standards would have yielded at least a few less EF-5s on April 27, 2011.

In recent years, I think Mayflower is probably the best example of how the pendulum has swung well too far in the direction of assigning impossible engineering standards to reach EF-5.

Hopefully, the forthcoming updates to the EF scale help bring things back to a more reasonable/realistic place.


 

This guy right here.

DVN has added the video still I offered them (same as my avatar) to their 3/31 event page.

https://www.weather.gov/dvn/summary_03312023

56 minutes ago, Geoboy645 said:

There are over 30 different flood warnings and watches out right now across WI, MN, and the UP. Several rivers including the Mississippi are at or forecasted to be at moderate flood stage. While this isn't quite hitting the worst-case scenario for this melt, still a major flood for the Mississippi basin. Will be interesting to see how much, if any, effect the storm later this weekend will affect the rivers.

Yeah, we got lucky in that the active storm pattern pretty much shut down after the 4/4-4/5 event. In 2008 we had a big melt followed by relentless thunderstorm (including training MCS) activity for about three weeks straight from late May into June.

7 hours ago, andyhb said:

https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2014/05/05/meteorologist-defends-ef4-rating-on-vilonia-tornado

This is getting into a whole OT can of worms but IMO this is bogus because it was said when the EF-scale was adopted that it would be a 1:1 changeover from the original Fujita scale, I.E. an F0 then would be an EF0 now, and so on all the way on up. Obviously in practice that's not true because the definitive descriptor of F5 damage was "strong frame houses lifted off foundations and carried considerable distances to disintegrate...". Now of course, not all frame houses are created equal and "strong" is subjective so applying some engineering standards and scientific rigor isn't a bad idea, but the pendulum has swung too far, in some cases very much too far in that direction.

Now, I agree with @andyhb that Vilonia 2014 is the most egregious case of this (just ahead of Chickasha and Goldsby, OK 5/24/2011), and set a bad precedent to the point where it's gone way beyond the understandable challenges with determining the difference between EF4 and EF5 based on the engineering quality of a structure that no longer exists, and resulted in suspiciously lowballed ratings much further down the scale (to the point where in some cases we've seen the sweeping away of frame homes initially rated as low as EF2, which is outside the bounds of the scale, before being "corrected" to low-end EF3).

6 hours ago, frostfern said:

Before the Morch, it used to seem like all those old records from the mid 20th century were impossible to beat.  It's still hard to beat a lot of summer records though, despite a warming climate overall.  Seems like it's harder to get the heat without the humidity these days. To really smash records you need a dry heat, more often than not.  July 1995 did both heat and humidity, but that was about as unusual as Morch 2012.

July 1995 is one of those rare weather months that stands out in my memory. At the time we lived in a house with two window A/C units, one in the living room and one in my parents' bedroom which they didn't like to use because they didn't trust the wiring up there (1920's house with one two-prong outlet per bedroom, except the master which had two, my dad upgraded all the wiring on the first floor but never got around to the second before we moved out). I don't think nine-year-old me wore a shirt outside of school all month. Fans going full blast in every room and almost nightly thunderstorms. Good times.

10 hours ago, Quincy said:

That was my first tornado. I did a terrible job trying to chase and document it, even though I was directly in front of it. With El Reno recently in mind and my inexperience, I bailed north(?!) at the last minute, thinking I’d be cutting it too close if I went southeast. I probably could have made it, but being new and extra cautious, I bailed. Knowing what I know now, I would have continued southeast another exit or two, instead of getting off in Mayflower. Then I would have probably gotten some incredible footage from the immediate southeast.

To this day, the radar signature remains as the most impressive I’ve ever chased, let alone have been a couple of miles away from.

It’s a great example of a warm front near the Arkansas River valley enhancing the channeling of low level flow. Always beware a warm front draped from NW/WNW to SE/ESE across central Arkansas. We’ve seen those setups produce prolific tornadoes before. 

The 00z LZK sounding is also one of the best sampled, regularly scheduled RAOBs you’ll ever see for a violent tornado, being in close proximity to the tornado in time and distance:

This is something I just learned recently from watching Trey Greenwood's videos but this is a good, stark example here. The hodograph shape will resemble the radar structure of supercells that form in the shear environment it represents. We can see how the hodograph folds back on itself in the upper levels, and thus how the storm's forward-flank core curls out ahead of the tornado's path. This can make for not-great viewing conditions even though the rear flank is fairly well separated from the core and not "rain-wrapped" in the stereotypical HP fashion. Something similar was observed at Louisville, MS the following day.

OTOH the storm I chased in Iowa on March 31 formed in an environment with much less clockwise curvature in the upper levels, the hodograph went straight out to the northeast and very little rain fell in the eventual path of the tornado as the storm's core skirted by to the north.

They've finally corrected/updated the survey to reflect the fact that a cycle occurred just southwest of Keota. So it's now properly two tornadoes, one EF3, one EF4.

https://www.weather.gov/dvn/summary_03312023

Just now, mnchaserguy said:

It’s going to be 80 on Wednesday. We may still have a shot at breaking our snow record a few days later.


.

Gotta love spring in the Midwest.

Reedited my footage to cut out most of the low-contrast approach of the original Ottumwa/Farson tornado, refined my contrast adjustments on some of the shots and actually added a couple seconds to the shot crossing 92 which I had cut when I didn't really need to.

1 hour ago, hardypalmguy said:

Palm tree weather.

We palmin' now.

9 hours ago, Chinook said:

a bit of tornado trivia

 

Kinda interesting that they haven't seen fit to use it since, even with the extreme conditions of 4/27/11 or that infamous HRRR simulation on 5/20/19.

8 hours ago, cyclone77 said:

DVN has now confirmed 28 tornadoes between last Friday and Tuesday.  Pretty nice start to the severe season around these parts.  

Do they still have the Ottumwa-Keota-Kalona family as a single EF4 path?