Well, everything went squall line too early, that’s the bottom line. The backing of the 850 winds I was expecting really didn’t pan out, and that was the ingredient we needed to get some more single cell activity out of the mess. Overall, not bad. Lots of scary looking clouds and one rather poor tornado. I am calling it a tornado too (some others aren’t). By the very definition of a tornado it qualifies, as there was rotation on the ground directly under cloud base rotation, so there was a connection there.
” Tornado — 1. A violently rotating column of air, in contact with the ground, either pendant from a cumuliform cloud or underneath a cumuliform cloud, and often (but not always) visible as a funnel cloud “
I don’t have time to put up any pics or videos, but Paul Stofer’s post on StormTrack captured it good. We were on the other side of it from him.
This thing reminded me EXACTLY of the tornado I got caught up in, up in Nebraska in 2004. It was later determined to be a secondary vortex to the first one, that had formed on the leading edge of the RFD gust front and to the SE of the main tornado. When this one started to spin up on Sunday, I kept thinking how it was spinning up exactly the same. The difference being, this one dissipated right away.
Not a bad day, I am glad I got out. Added entertainment listening to one of the net controllers on the spotter network rant about the TV chaser calling in shelf clouds as wall clouds and a funnel that was reported was not one, and how they all needed to listen to them to know what they were looking at. The ironic part was later seeing chasers posting pictures of their DEFINITE wall clouds and DEFINITE funnel cloud, and then the “tornado thing” that a lot of us intercepted. I hope they kiss and make up before Wednesday, as it looks like one hell of a day for OK. More on that tomorrow!