Summer Surprise in Nebraska

Interesting to see tornado watches in CO and NE today. Well, maybe not so much in CO but through NE. It is far  from a synoptically evident area this time of year, normally, and today's morning analysis (from what I went back and looked at) showed nothing to depart from this norm.


First, I see the watch ....

So then I take a look at radar and see the storm ..

and am immediately impressed. It had about 90 kts of shear (delta-v) at the time of this image (I didn't save the velocity image..just trust me.) and a report, via Fire Dept and Rescue, of a tornado 15 minutes prior to this.

So naturally I wanted to look at what the total shear looked like and the VWP (VAD Wind Profile -- you can look that up if you don't know what that is :) ) to see what the profile looks like. Very impressive low levels, while the mid/upr levels are average, at best. But this is an isolated cell in a fairly capped envioronment so it had plenty of time to spin. No contamination, no cell interactions, etc. 

I figured I would look at the surface data. Is there a front? I haven't looked at anything all day so I have no idea what's going on!

Click to enlarge!

It isn't super obvious to the naked eye what the boundaries are, but you can see a nice moisture axis from KS into the NE PH with nice backed winds along southern Nebraska.  This would certainly be a case to prove that one needs to break out the colored pencils and dive into the data and analyze it to death. Again, this isn't synoptically evident! This requires some real meteorological analysis ...and no model would help you here, for sure!






So, what are some of SPC's mesoanalysis magic numbers saying? First, the SRH ...

 Certainly a lot of Shear in the low levels! You could see that from the VWP profile from above -- and this storm was very close to that radar, but nice to see the analysis in this image match that thought.

What about CAPE/CIN?

Clearly, a lot of CIN around but this is after 9pm. I'm sure, earlier, it was a little less capped and I would think the fact there are storms in the area proves that. If it doesn't, then, well, I give up. But it does show a max cape area, in an area of high low level shear. Not bad! When you have isolated storms that aren't going to encounter a ton of outflow/contamination/mergers, etc, they can survive as supercells even if the total shear isn't all that grand. What they need is time and an isolated storm has nothing but time.



I certainly didn't do a long, detailed, analysis of what was going on today/tonight -- and maybe this tornado was bogus -- but it certainly goes to show you the atmosphere likes to surprise us! 

Chasing this, though, would be impossible. No one in their right mind would have driven to that location today to see this unless you lived within a couple of hours or so and really were on top of things.

Very cool stuff today!