KS Tornadoes, Strange Dew Points
Henry came in with a heavy heart and a sigh this morning. He and I were looking at the weather data from yesterday afternoon's tornado outbreak in southwest Kansas, which surprised many meteorologists, including him.
He said frankly in his blog PREMIUM | PRO today:
It was a strange day yesterday as sneaking warm and humid air was able to wrap in through Oklahoma into the upper low as it came out of the Rockies. We saw storms developing across Kansas under the upper level, but not in my wildest dreams would I have thought that the tornadoes would occur under the upper level like it did yesterday.
But the government's SPC [JessePedia] didn't see it either until it was nearly too late, as far as I can tell from the data. They had tornado risks for the area at nearly zero in their noon outlook, and the situation wasn't foretold by them until just before the tornadoes struck (MCD 2157 by the famous storm chaser Roger Edwards). But a finger of warm, moist dew points snaked up around the upper-level low, strengthening what would normally be small, weak, or non-existent funnels under it, causing 20 tornado reports, of which the highlights are shown below.
When Tornado Watch #0889 was issued by famous storm chaser Rich Thompson, it listed a 50% chance of more than 2 tornadoes, something very rare.
(KEY) | WITH RADAR (NOAA)
It's been too long since college for me to decode this severe weather situation but I would like to point out a couple interesting mesoscale things that were going on. Hopefully Dodge City NWS, who issued most of the warnings, will have a summary out soon, or at least some storm surveys (as of this writing, they only have the initial reports). However I did notice some interesting things.
*One point of interest is the multiple outflow boundaries you can pick up on the radar movie (see above, provided by AccuWeather.com RadarPlus). As if the rotation and dynamics of an upper-level low pressure system isn't complex enough, we had several boundaries interacting and curving around at the surface.
The next interesting thing is that there was a sudden, massive drop in dew points, then a quick reversal, near Gage, Oklahoma as the storms started to fire to the north. This, across from the finger of warm dew points Henry references to the north, created a stark dew point boundary not unlike a dryline. You can see this in the image above (the rock-like blobs are where the tornado reports were centered). The dew point plummeted from 40 to 10 (the humidity at this point was 8%!), then it skyrocketed back to 40.
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