With seven tornadoes, Dimmitt TX supercell is another monster
A monster supercell thunderstorm formed on the New Mexico/Texas border around 20:40 Z time Friday. For over 10 hours, the storm moved slowly, whipping the countryside with high winds and heavy rains. In Castro County, Texas, it spawned seven tornadoes over a two-hour period last Friday night.
It presented strongly on radar, showing multiple hook echoes and extremely high winds around the rotation center of the tornado. The storm was also observed by NOAA's new satellite, with an amazing 1-minute GOES-16 data loop. At 9 p.m., the "NROT" product on GREarth software showed a wide area of rotation that was literally "off the chart."
The NWS storm survey says this single storm caused 32 NWS warnings (18 severe thunderstorm warnings, nine tornado warnings and five flood warnings) to be issued and prompted 29 local storm reports from storm chasers and spotters. The largest of those was found to have been a 1.1-mile-wide EF-3 tornado that tracked 4.5 miles near the town of Dimmitt, Texas. Thankfully, it only clipped the town, damaging a few homes.
At least seven tornadoes were seen, most in the rural areas near the New Mexico border. And some of them grew to massive sizes.
This YouTube video by storm chaser Stas Speransky shows the sheer enormity of the tornado, considered a "wedge" because it was so close to the ground:
Brandon Green, another storm chaser, found himself in the middle of the storm surrounded by satellite tornadoes dropping from all around him. This was not unlike the situation in which Tim Samaras and three other storm chasers lost their lives in the "El Reno Tornado" in May 2013. This storm also presented similar on radar, a slow-moving monster that spun out multiple tornadoes with multiple suction vortices (satellite tornado) dancing around it.
Brandon is a very lucky man. I wish there were a way that we could detect or classify these monster storms like Dimmitt and El Reno, and that there was some way to keep people out of harm's way. For all the damage it caused, there was some beauty in the storm, which spawned some beautiful clouds over the National Weather Service office in Amarillo.
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