College of DuPage: American Meteorological Society Meeting with Skip Talbot

good evening everybody my name is Paul Savola I'm the president of the Chicago EMS and this officially is a Chicago EMS chapter it is co-sponsored tonight with the college of dupage EMS student group how many of our student AMS members do we have here tonight a couple of you guys anybody who's interested in being in the member of the co d AMS if you're interested in this please talk to jacob afterward that would be a good person to talk to they're gonna be planning some stuff for students specifically we'll be doing some talks I'm gonna give you a couple of announcements here tonight before we go on a couple things first of all this is what's going on right now there's a couple of tornado warnings down southern Illinois and in the Missouri Bootheel this is the Paducah range for the how many of you were here at the last meeting with Christine Wilgus so this is her office and so they're actually getting the tornado warnings now and it's pretty fun to have that stuff out there so the beginning of storm season I wanted to give you a little understanding I've been involved with dr. Jen Seanie from NIU who is not here tonight because he's on he's gonna be on a broadcast called weather nerds and he'll be doing that tonight so he can't make this meeting but we've started up our half hour extended range tornado activity forecasts we start it and we do this from March through June and this is our sixth year of trying to do week two and week three forecasts and we've actually you're going to be published in The Bulletin of the AMS coming this April so take a look for that article we did our first forecast and we are here we chickened out and we're doing average forecast for weeks two and three and there's a climatologies about 12 or 15 tornado reports in that time period but we have below average confidence it's a pretty interesting pattern this year where there's a lot of cold air coming on the east it's fairly active in the southwest but it's for those of you who in meteorology it's a little bit barotropic and so we don't have a lot of directional shear we get a lot of lines so we're not looking at a major tornado event for a while we usually are looking for windows of opportunity when we see the pattern that will evolve in the Pacific and then eventually to a few outbreaks of tornadoes in the United States so if you want to be checking this out please feel free to do so I also want to give you a couple of other bits of information the DuPage County is going to be holding their this is our 30th year of doing the advanced spotter training they've extended the registration date through March 4th that noon so you still have a couple days if you want to get involved in this I know we have a bunch of people from my 11:15 class that are getting big extra credit I don't know if Ron stends is going to have extra credit for his other classes but this is a really great seminar how many people have had some sort of a basic training of spotters for tornados or do that kind of stuff so this is the advanced 130 years it's gonna have a couple of good speakers doctor well soon to be doctor stens will be talking and a couple of other people from The Weather Channel will be here and a number of people from the National Weather Service will be speaking as well so if you're interested just type in Google DuPage severe seminar and you'll come to this thing last thing is we do have a storm chasing program and I kind of need to make a pitch we've got four trips this year and we are still looking to fill a couple of positions on trip one which is coming up in just about two months from now a little bit less than that so if anyone is interested in going tornado chasing with us it is a two credit hour class as long as you don't get thrown off the trip you'll you can get an A pretty easily if you die on the trip it's an A+ as long as you've got your video camera going but take a look at the dates that's going to be from the end of April to beginning of May sort of that early season big activity scary stuff season and we're we're looking we're a little bit down this year than we've been before so trip two and three are already full but we do need trip one and then trip four is later into June sort of the late season High Plains which looks to be a good year with the moisture content that's going on out there we have a number of people who are signed up already and are talking about doing it so if you're interested come talk to either myself or run after the meeting or just give us a call email that'd be great what the if you want to just go here if you go to weather Co D edu / chasing you'll find this information these are all the dates here April 23rd through May 3rd we go wherever we need to go so we take off and day by day we decide this is where we're gonna end up so we went to New Orleans and that was a good time we we didn't we didn't get any tornados in New Orleans but we did get a hurricane or two or in some people three so anyway that's some things that I just wanted to take you look at we are going to be having an April meeting we don't have the date scheduled yet it will either be a Monday or Tuesday night and we're going to be talking about having it at Louis University aboard their DC no what do you hold will hold half of the meeting on the airplane and then the rest will go into the flight dispatch area as well as the some of the areas where people can sit and pretend they're an air traffic controller or a pilot so we have I think four simulators and people want to take advantage of that and then we'll sit and talk and have the rest of the meeting that'll be awesome yeah so we're planning on when that's going to be what it's going to look like but it'll be sort of a roundtable discussion we'll have some pilots we'll have observers at airports we'll have four casters for United we're gonna have a lot of people involved in the weather community with aviation so if that interests you in any way shape or form please do so you and I'm still trying to figure out whether or not we can then walk over across the parking lot into the National Weather Service office so it'd be kind of it could be kind of a dual thing if we can figure out if the group's too big in one part we could take the group over to the Nashua so well it'll be a fun night and it'll be great great to do and if we can if we're lucky we'll take the plane up and fly off to South Florida and then they'll even be a way better and if we are able to do that I'm buying the first round of her Kayne's okay so so keep that in mind Chicago EMS this is an announcement for you guys do we have has everybody signed up for this year we are still looking to make sure that we have our membership it is $20 to be a CEO duh sorry a Chicago EMS member and we count on you guys to help build our budgets so that we can bring in great speakers like we have today and we're gonna continue on this we are also investigating the possibility of doing a I'm a banquet like we did last year so we'll be in touch with you sometime soon I'll probably do it at the Maggiano's if you're interested it was good so we'll take up a poll online how many of you in the Chicago AMS are getting our information through email primarily how many of you are getting it through Facebook primarily okay so we'll send it out both ways okay great well the next thing I want to do is introduce skip Talbot and just tell you a little bit about what we've been talking about skip is one of these great great visionaries of how to visualize severe weather I got to know skip several years ago he's done a lot of the advanced spotter training workshops with me and he is just amazing at putting visuals and discussing them and teaching them and he does this with video in just ways that I've never been able to do we also he has got some work with pikas Hank who is another colleague of his and he's come out here and these two are probably leading the way as far as video visualizations of severe weather so he's got some amazing things to show you of things that has happened last year but he's also gonna be talking about storm chase safety and really safety in general in the chaser community and those who are doing spotters as you all know storm chasing is kind of blown up especially after the movie twister and a lot of people are becoming more and more foolish they're more and more reckless in what they're doing and some of these situations are going to lead to certainly more deaths we've had a couple of deaths we've had a number of serious accidents and these things are just gonna go up unless we're really aware of facing the issues correctly head-on and dealing with the safety issues so I'm very excited to have skip over here so please welcome skip tailed it thanks for having me great turnout tonight how many students do we have here lots of students awesome how many storm chasers great awesome very good so yeah I just want to talk about kind of what I've been doing lately I didn't prepare a big scripted presentation like I normally do for the big DuPage severe weather seminar that I usually do in March with you guys so I just want to kind of show you what I've been working on lately and kind of talk through it so yeah Pecos Hank you guys all know Pecos Hank right he's he's an awesome storm chaser he joined our team last year I said Hank do you have a shot of a tornado in a rearview mirror cuz I think it would make a great pun for my talk title and he's like yeah here we go of course he's got one so thanks to Hank for the title shot so here's what I've been doing lately I joined a group of scientists in 2016 Anton Simon dr. Anton Simon and dr. Tracy Simon are running a tornado research program basically their goal is to use photogrammetry and multi-perspective video to triangulate and get a three-dimensional image of what tornado wind fields are doing it right at ground level so an area where we can't look we can't see we have no idea what's going on right at the ground level even with our mobile Doppler radar trucks the beam is still slicing midway up the funnel so we don't actually know how fast the winds are where they're actually doing damage so that's the goal of the project we've been working on we've been trying since 2016 to get get the shot get our data get a good case going here also in our group is dr. John Allen he talked to you guys at the dupage seminar a couple years ago I think he's up in Central Michigan now he chases with us and he's also in the lab crunching all the numbers for so hopefully he'll be getting us some results from from our latest data here soon and then most recently after the last year's dupage seminar where hank was a speaker hank Shima I said Hank you need to come chase with us you are the guy for getting the tornado shot we need you on our team please join us any day yeah eagerly jumped on board so this year we've got Pecos Hank on our team and there's our whole group assembled me with my chaste partner Jennifer brinly she's a professional photographer up in Milwaukee and she's been chasing with me for a number of years and so yeah we finally got what we call the dream team everybody comes together and we were finally able to really get out there and and chase to our full potential so yeah we were super stoked to have Hank join us too this year so and here was the day this was the day that everything clicked and it all came together so I'm just gonna start from the beginning here and walk you through what happened for us this day this was May 28th 2019 so last year I wish I had the like the high-rez local plots I just had these broad national scale maps so we're gonna like pretend we're playing Minecraft here and look at like really pixelated images but hopefully I can walk you through here or the set up so it makes sense but I wish I could show you in high resolution what happened here but anyway here's the overall setup we've got a nice surface low right over central Kansas we've got an upper-level low that's coming out of the Four Corners region there at the surface we've got a triple point west central Kansas we have a stationary boundary kind of wavy across northeast Kansas into Kansas City triple point here is west of Salina west of Russell out there somewhere to the south a dry line its marked as a cold front on here and a stationary boundary which is probably a reinforced outflow boundary running way back into Colorado so that's what we got going on at the surface here just to give you kind of a broad overview of the the synaptic setup here 500 millibar winds we've got trough we've got a nice burst of energy kicking in rounding the trough here so it looks like the stage is set we've got this dry line warm front triple bond triple point play we've got that trough gonna initiate off that boundary send storms in the warm front looks like a classic May tornado set up so we're pretty geeked and a good strong flow 70 knots they're rounding that trough access all right a nice kick in low-level jet here 850 millibar winds somewhere between 25 and 40 knots across eastern Kansas here in the warm sector so good good kick in low level wind shear so we've got probably a tornado set up here and just another peek at where that energy on that 500 millibar chart is you can see we've got a nice like little speed max or a little shortwave here coming in and that's gonna set the stage for storm initiation give us a lot of the speed shear that we need to get things going here's certain mean sea level pressure just so you can get a feel for for the pattern here there's our nice little low sitting up right here and just kind of keep in mind of what's going on on the top and just immediately behind the low you know kind of where those winds start to curl around so you start getting that northeast surface wind just kind of keep that in mind as I go along here and and and what's happening with the other parameters in regards to that region here is temp and and dews at the surface very rich moisture coming in the warm sector here you can see our nice warm front stationary boundary draped across here but look out to the west looks like the moisture is actually wrapping around that low quite a bit usually you have a pretty sharp cutoff here and the moistures east of that surface low but yeah actually had some wrap around there which which was getting our attention quite a bit so here's Cape mixed layer cape and we have 4,000 joules per kilogram just south of the triple point just ahead of the dry line explosive so storms are gonna fire on that cold front dry line they're gonna get really robust get really going there and that extreme instability and then hopefully track towards that warm front there and produce tornadoes at least that's the goal for as storm chasers but again look at that cape it goes way back west and around the site of the low so there's a lot of stuff happening up there up in northwest Kansas - and shear looks great we've got 50 to 70 knots right across the warm sector they're in warm front and even stronger values there further west where that trough is is coming around surface to one kilometer shear so I like to look at this when we're looking for tornadoes so you've got 20 knots of 0 to 1 kilometer shear looks that's great for tornadoes and that's what we have here across much of the warm sector in eastern Kansas even 30 knots here over Kansas City that's pretty impressive so we've got some kick in low-level winds here effective storm relative ho lissa t so just a gauge of how much rotation these storms are going to be working with our directional wind shear really peaked off to the east over the Kansas City area into Missouri we've got 300 on the effective SRH I usually want to see about 200 for a good tornado show so we've got more than enough here and yeah so really impress the values out to the east there where that low-level jets kick in let's go ahead and look at sig tour and try and cheat a little bit and figure out where these tornadoes are down the dry line some decent parameter the hot spot the largest region of three is out along that stationary boundary that warm front off to the east and even wrapping around the low again way off to the northwest there's a little spot of highlighted area there too so here's your day 1 convective outlook from the Storm Prediction Center and they went moderate risk in the morning outlook for this so 15 hatched that means they're expecting a big tornado day and this really gets our attention wow this is going to be a big moderate risk day it's going to be lots of tornadoes and and so where is our target right pretty much textbook right we're gonna look for initiation here off the dry line storms are gonna track northeast when they bump that warm front they're gonna spin up a tornado for us so Lawrence Kansas right it's a slam-dunk we said nope we're not going to Lawrence Kansas yes you can write whatever you want this will not be on the quiz so I know Paul might put it on the quiz I'm not going to put it on the quiz so yeah whatever you want to take notes of go for it so so yeah anyway we decided no we're not gonna play the normal target we are gonna play Way Out West in the 2% so and why are we doing that because it looks so good off to the east there and here are the plots that I kind of want to show you that nudged us away from the popular conventional target so this is LCL heights roughly it's gonna be how high the bottom of your storm is off the ground so I usually want to see this at a thousand lower is better for tornadoes but when it gets the too low you actually can't see the tornadoes anymore because they get rain-wrapped and there's really Scud e and grungy it's hard to see and if the terrains bad forget about it so I want these to be in a nice sweet spot in around a thousand out here in eastern Kansas where it's really saturated LCLs between 750 and 500 is really low a little worried about the chase ability of those storms drier air out west really had this nice nosey of drier air punching in here to the west right under the surface low so getting a much better LCL value there that I'd like to see this one was really really big for us this is precipitable water how much water is in the column of the atmosphere that can be squeezed into rain right and so I'm getting values of almost two inches out here in eastern Kansas into Missouri and so that's a ton of water up in the atmosphere and that's gonna be dumped out of the storm here we're gonna have very very rainy storms to the east so I do not like seeing a high P watt like this at all but looking out west ooh much closer to one out there so that's that's definitely getting my attention too here are 300 millibar winds so up in the Jetstream right and so we're looking for that upper-level windshear venting for our storm those anvil level winds and and what do we got here all of the energy is way out west it's lagging behind the warm sector so our storm it's coming off the dry line it's gonna start moving into two lesser winds so what does that mean we've got a ton of Cape we've got a ton of precipitable water in this column we've got very low LCLs we don't have a lot of venting aloft what kind of storm are we gonna wind up with in that kind of environment any guesses HP absolutely so we are anticipating a high precipitation storm mode out east so we said no good I don't want to chase that kind of storm so this was the kicker for us if you've been to my DuPage some of our talks I talked about my secret weapons on the meso scale analysis you can pull this up this is 0 to 3 kilometer cape so that atmospheric instability in the lowest layers of the atmosphere if you have a lot of this it's it's good for tornadoes tornadoes need zero to three kilometer cape where is it peaked we have a big big bubble right on and actually behind the surface low and what's really crazy about behind the surface low is you have a kicking northeast wind back there and there's often a ton of surface vorticity so when you have this combination of really robust instability in the low levels and really really strong vorticity that screams tornado to me so I saw this plot and I said yeah let's not go east these storms are actually moving into a less favorable environment in terms of low-level instability still a lot here over Lawrence in the Kansas City area more than enough for a tornado but this is really getting my intention where these blue rings and these red mean rings meet way out here in north-central Kansas I said that's our target let's do it so and just logistically speaking I'll try to talk to the other screen too like we want to get a tornado that we can get a shot of that's our goal so it's not just enough to forecast where the tornadoes are going be how che scible are these going to be so going out to eastern Kansas this is what I am imagining last year we had a high risk over Oklahoma they went 45 hatched on the day one Outlook which is huge you're expecting a big day and the parameters that day we're pretty iffy we wound up with really gray hazy low contrast skies and this is a tornado can you see it so this is not this is not what we want this is a crappy tornado and here's the other problem is this is an entire line of storm chasers and we are going 3540 miles an hour well this thing is saying bye-bye I'll see you later so it's just sailing away and we're all stuck in what Tim Marshall calls the conga line so we're thinking okay where is the conga line gonna be where is the crappy storm mode gonna be and that's gonna be eastern Kansas because everyone's gonna be playing that big moderate risk where it's 15 hatched and and where the skies are really great in soupy so we said nope we're not going there we're playing the secondary target way out west so here we are at Beloit Kansas chillin at a park at 4 o'clock in the afternoon when we arrived in Beloit we had surface temp I think was about 78 degrees and we had a 70 degree dew point with a north east surface wind so when we got out of the car and felt that like it blew my mind normally when you've got normally when that wind starts to back from southerly up to easterly and Norton and then northeasterly you're on the cool side of the boundary okay so you're losing your cape you're losing that energy you need for your tornado great directional wind shear but all the capes down south where that where those winds are actually out of the south but here in Beloit we had both northeast wind and it's unstable Wow screamed tornado to me so we are super super geeked to play this set up and and we're about an hour out from the show now so and here we go storms erupted and tornado warnings and we're off and this was the first storm of the day that we passed nice nice meso here great structure I wanted to stay and chase this thing there's another storm way down here that's producing so luckily people in our group came together and we all clicked as a team and we said nope we can't keep up with this let it go get the producing storm so almost missed the tornado show but we kept going and we arrived to this site so here's our storm that we wound up intercepting absolutely gigantic supercell this is a super wide angle shot so you're looking at the entire sky here this mesocyclone is several miles wide so this is a normal sized tornado coming out of the bottom of it here we're way back so big tornado coming out of an unusual spot I usually want to see it parked kind of in the center of the meso why is it way out there and this thing is absolutely gigantic as we approached there was just this bewildering array of vortices under this thing is actually really intimidating because on the approach I had didn't have bearings on where the tornado should be I just saw a gigantic mesocyclone spanning the whole horizon and there was a funnel here another funnel there and a third funnel over there so there were tornadoes coming out of this thing left and right I didn't have my bearings kind of intimidating so I thought I was really uneasy on the approach here so but yeah then just a crazy alien mass of tornadoes and funnels on this storm so some really freaky weird stuff this looked like it was on the southern rim of the mesocyclone but then way out to the east there was this thing another tornado and you can see it looks like a tiny little occluded updraft here but then there's this snaky tube running all the way across here that first I thought it was like a horizontal vortex arch a toroidal thing you know where you have an anticyclonic tornado and a cyclonic pair and this arch connects um but we actually think is this is just the updraft tube from this tornado and for some reason it's grotesquely distended out from the storm so really bizarre otherworldly behavior on this storm seeing these updraft tubes there's actually an updraft tube though it's coming way up out of this one too it's kind of hard make out with the contrast here but yeah here's a here's a video of these two tornadoes in progress here so super super pretty we don't yet have our research case though because we want to get in a nice close shot of what's going on underneath these funnel clouds here so we said let's go south let's get in there for the shot so we stopped right next to a little farmstead then the tornadoes finally consolidated now I had my bearings tornadoes right parked in the middle of the mesocyclone where it should be now and that's when it really took off it's underneath the main updraft of the supercell so much bigger much more robust tornado now all of these little tendrils spinning around underneath the the funnel here you can see the low-level Jets and the mist kicking through and in some of the outer circulation spiraling around it so finally starting to get a good shot things are looking really promising we're just letting this tornado come to us now and in fact it was coming right at us so we had to actually duck south to get out of the way of it turned around and this is what we saw when we turned around that farm that we were just parked at here it is getting struck by this tornado as it impacts luckily this is just an outbuilding it's not a house or anything but this is an entire barn right here in the air flying apart and and the crazy thing about this is here's the funnel so you've got suction vortices and where the funnel touches the ground over here look how far ahead that far that barn is flying it to pieces ahead of that tornado so that makes me really uneasy so sometimes I feel like I can get close to a tornado because the funnel small and over there but these winds they extend way out from these tornadoes sometimes so you've got to really watch out for that so this was the shot this is what we've been trying for three years to get that's Pecos Hank we're in the vehicle and Anton and Tracy are behind us we have all three teams shooting this Caray of suction vortices and the debris as this thing crosses the road immediately in front of us so now we can take these three shots three different angles triangulate them and we can actually now hopefully when John Allen crunches the numbers get wind speed measurement readings as that tornado crossed the road there in front of us Thanks so yeah that was this was our big catch and finally we pulled it off so all three teams coming together clicking and from the forecast to sticking to our target to Hank stepping up and saying we should intercept this storm here and here and here so everyone came together and we had a great chase and pulled it off we drove up to the farm Hank immediately got out and ran into the farm to see if there was anybody in there that needed her help because the last thing we want to see as storm chasers is people get impacted and hurt and killed by these things we want all of our tornadoes to be out here in the field we don't want it we don't want to see any sort of human impact at all with these tornadoes and almost all of them are out in the middle of nowhere where that where this doesn't happen luckily no one was home and it turned out that just barns were hit so the houses were actually fine on that farm so so good news all around we got a data set there were no casualties on this tornado 24 mile long path length half a mile wide so an ef-2 pretty significant tornado so yeah and just this is a really wide shot of when we were looking at those tendrils here but this structure here is really kind of crazy if this barber pole updraft above it and then like check out this cool wave coming off the back side of that mesocyclone so some sort of horizontal roll or something like almost like a wingtip vortex or something so just really neat stuff would love to know what is actually going on in this storm so poor SPC kind of had a bad day kind of dropped the ball this was our storm here so it actually started producing outside of the 2% and this was our main target way out here on the edge of the outlook area there was another supercell that produced and they nailed that one finally but yeah we actually did not get a tornado watch at our target until 15 minutes after the first tornado so it's just kind of crazy like it was like they weren't paying attention to that corner of the day but to me that little corner of Kansas it just screamed tornadoes so that's the kind of stuff I'm looking for is that secondary target where we can get a pretty tornado out in the middle of nowhere so it wasn't all good news for everybody that day unfortunately while we were chasing this tornado another tornado near the Lawrence Kansas area impacted a commercial storm-chasing tour group we found out that two of their vans had been rolled by a tornado and that there were injuries well yeah there were injuries nobody died though so that was good so these were the initial reports out of the accident it was a fluke spin up tornado it was a satellite two miles south of the main muscle cyclone and that two bands had been hit by this relatively small tornado had the Vans been just positioned a little bit further down the road it probably would have missed and there were a few minor injuries so I said wow that's pretty crazy it's just really really bad luck the National Weather Service conducted really really detailed damage surveys of these tornadoes and what happened was there was a big EF 4 that wound up tracking south of Lawrence Kansas that's the track way up on the top here and then there was a long track EF two that preceded that tornado and what what looked like happened was the EF two actually merged into the developing EF 4 so kind of an unusual tornado situation there where we've got merging tornadoes on these very interesting-looking tracks and people said skip you should look into this what happened to this tour group and I thought it was a pretty open enclosed case is probably got a little too close and there was this freak tornado that wound up hitting I'm just really bad luck here's the site of the accident where the tour group got struck and and so I saw this I said whoa something else is happening here something pretty crazy it looks like this is actually a long-track tornado and that they got hit by and actually doing some pretty significant EF 2 damage here and check out these weird shapes in the path here there's like these unusual lobes in the damage path of the tornado I'm not sure well what that is I didn't talk to the NWS folks to see what why they put that shape there what I'm guessing is there's an inflow jet into the tornado here there's surges of wind that are feeding the tornado and that's where the tornado ramps up so we get our most intense damage here and there's probably an inflow jet here feeding this tornado and making it ramped up right there that's where the tour group got hit so I said this is a really unusual an interesting case with a merger long tracked tornado and an accident here I was really curious to figure out what what would happen here it turns out that none of these initial claims were true instead of a fluke spin-up tornado we had a significant EF two with an 11 mile path length this turned out to be the main tornado and was pendent to a long duration mesocyclone it was not a satellite it's pretty wide tornado 300 yards wide at its widest and it hit all four vans in this tour group two of the vans got rolled but all of those bands were in the tornado according to the damage survey and the videos from in those bands so so really pretty significant accident here and the initial reports of the injuries were really really underestimated twelve people went to the hospital there were broken bones one of the clients was airlifted to Kansas City with a broken neck but fortunately everybody has made a full recovery as far as I can tell so I started digging into this and I thought this needs to be looked at more we need to figure out what went wrong here and hopefully help chasers not fall into this same situation again so that we can hopefully avoid an accident like this I contacted several of the clients that were on that tour do you have photos do you have videos where were you that day and after this was probably a five month long project hundreds if not thousands of hours of work went into this I produced a video presentation about what happened on May 28th and what went wrong that day so I'll cover a little bit of that here tonight but if you want to see the full thing it's up on YouTube I go over an exhaustive detail everything that happened that day and what the storm looked like and all of the structure here but but in a nutshell here's the here's what the tour group did they started east of a little town Overbrook Kansas they stacked in front of a very large high precipitation supercell you can see here's where the mesocyclone and hook echo would be it's coming up there up to there and this here is a the tornado track of the tornado that impacts them you'll see the tornado appear on the map animated but here's the mesocyclone these are tornado warnings the tour group moves east to stay ahead of that storm tornado forms behind them as they're driving down the highway they can't see it's very heavily rain wrapped inside of this high precipitation supercell they turn north on the first paved road that they can find hoping to get a view of a tornado somewhere in that storm they turn around hoping to get back to that highway and they're struck by this tornado buried deep within the core of that supercell here is the velocity storm relative velocity you can see the red and green here indicating rotation in the mesocyclone and then as that tornado forms you'll see a much more intense velocity couplet associated with that tornado here so here it goes and that tornado Peaks as it crosses or the velocity couple of peaks as it crosses the highway there that tornado is actually close to peak intensity when it hit the tour group so but weirdly the velocity couplet is actually very difficult to see at during that time so I think a lot of chasers had problems identifying that specific couplet at them at the moment but anyway here's here's basically what happened is this tour group started probably up north in the Topeka area came south as storms were firing on that dry line cold front and then headed off this line of storms east of this town of Overbrook here you can see a big v-shaped forward flank on that supercell and then this is what would normally look like a hook echo on a normal storm closer to the radar so a more classic superself but you can see there's a little weak echo region here almost like a doughnut hole in the storm so that donut holes where the tornado is gonna be over your mesocyclone it's gonna be so this is the radar software the tour group was using at the time it turns out that they were probably aware that there was a velocity couple and a potential tornado in there so talking to the clients it looked like they knew that there's probably going to be a tornado in this storm and they were actively trying to identify it at the time here so but pretty difficult to see you have to know what you're looking for this is a velocity couplet the tour group would have been right about here when they were chasing this storm so yeah and and really well warned so all of this is coming together to me too and I'm now trying to figure out why how does this happen this tour group is led by extremely experienced exceptionally well-known and highly regarded storm chasers we have a great big storm it's it's well warned this is the tornado warning this polygon here there's 20 minutes of lead time from the accident site so when they got impacted here from when the warning was issued and the forecast track of the tornado was really well identified they used rotation in the mesocyclone to identify where the tornado would most likely the form gave them several minutes of lead time before the tornado finally formed here and then that tornado tracked right along this forecast trajectory so inside of the tornado warning they encode the direction and the course of the tornado and that tornado deviated only a half mile from the actual forecast path of that tornado so to me this was a well forecasted anticipated tornado and and I was a little baffled as to why such exceptional experienced storm chasers were falling victim to this luckily we had visuals of the storm itself to to kind of figure out what this storm looked like and maybe what storm chasers were thinking at the time because that's the big mystery to me here's the tour group they are look they're a couple miles east of this tornado right at the ball at the end of that hook echo that little blue arrow is another storm chaser this is his view to the west so this is the actual storm structure that they're seeing at the time that's the tour group driving up here and so knowing the position of this chaser and where the tornado was at that time according to the radar on the damage survey we can actually plot on the video where that tornado would then so this is kind of where the investigative mode stepped in here to figure out what went wrong on this chase what mistakes were made hopefully give some recommendations on how to correct them but you can see the tornado is buried in this very heavy area of precipitation those bowing your plank downdraft gust front and off to the north here there is a dark cloud base what I believe is the supercells inflow band here and to me this is pretty much textbook high precipitation supercell structure this big ball of rain in the rear flank of the storm that is rain wrapping around the storms mesocyclone these spiraling rain bands are what chasers likely called the barest Kage those aspiring rain bands form the bars of the cage embedded inside of that cage is the tornado and the tornado is the bear so on an HP supercell they're often completely rain wrapped and impossible to see but one of the things I try to do at DuPage whenever I get the chance to speak is to offer visual cues structure identification to help storm chasers identify these parts of the storm and infer where the tornado is going to be so even though we can't see the tornado to me there is great supercell structure still visible here we have a Boeing RFP gust front the updraft base is ahead of that gust front here and it makes this horseshoe shape a bowling see a backwards see and the tornado is usually at the top or north side of that and then off to the north there's an inflow band feeding into this storm here it's moving right to left into this region and to me that just points the way it points that where the tornado is going to be if I can see this kind of structure here it gives me great bearings on where that tornado might be so again my goal my hope is that storm chasers will see a site like this and they'll have their bearings on this storm they'll say hey this is a supercell I can see the rear flank gust front here I can see the inflow band you can even see the clouds how they spiral this whole mesocyclone above this base here these clouds just spiral around it that's where the broad scale rotation is and my hope is that chasers see this and they said yeah there's a tornado and if there's a it's probably right in here so at a glance my hope is that's what chasers do at some point silver lining tours the group that was hit they got north of that storm feature into what I like to call the inflow notch they went north of the path of the tornado and they turned around maybe they didn't see a tornado in there maybe they were trying to reposition maybe they thought that this was a dangerous part of the storm but for whatever reason they turned around and decided to head back to highway 56 here they still can't see the tornado in progress now a mile and a half to their southwest and this was their view at the time they turned around this was shot by one of the clients if you remember that storm structure from the last picture I showed this is your dark inflow Bay and band feeding into the storm this is the Bears cage it's this round circular region of streaky rain these rain bands are spiraling and wrapping around the circulation so when I see this it just screams this is the danger area watch out and unfortunately the tour group turned around and wound up driving directly into that area so again my hope is that chasers recognize that this is the most dangerous part of the storm this is the structure you need to be looking for and not enter that so it was about a minute or two later that they were impacted by the tornado that was reign wrapped inside of that region there's a video of the impact on YouTube I didn't put it in this presentation but if you watch my presentation or watch Jeff Lee Berman's the actual raw video is up on YouTube you can go and see the impact but totally rain-wrapped they didn't know it was there until basically it was right on top of them so and and so chasers were kind of fixated on why did they turn around what was going through their heads what what kind of was the reasoning here behind this one of the things I often heard cited was there was an area of rotation a large mesocyclone off to the north and this tour group was turned around to avoid that area of rotation you can see this big area of red and green if you track it from from frame to frame for several minutes it looks like it was tracking from west to east and then makes this abrupt left turn and goes to the northeast the tour group and others are claiming that this they turned around avoiding this rotation because this rotation goes on to produce the much larger Lawrence ef4 tornado it turns out that both tornadoes followed a really straight line the tornado track of the EF two and the following EF four were almost on a very linear rail so it was like something else was going on here there's a steady-state path for both of these tornadoes and I think what's happening is this is the actual track of the storms mesocyclone the tour group thought they were south of the mesocyclone they were actually north of the main tornado producing region of this storm these are gusts in the velocity data in feeding into this region so we have a big inflow surge here we have a big rear flank downdraft surge here and I think that's instead what's going on with this velocity data rather than there being a mesocyclone to the north so again this is the area in question chasers looking at this much more prominent area on a lower resolution radar they're saying hey here's the mesocyclone there's rotation in there that has my attention some of them can't make out this small couplet here which is where the actual tornado is so they're confused they're thinking that this is the actual mesocyclone off to the northwest this is what they're looking at as the primary tornado producing region of the storm and it turns out that this was probably a really critical mistake and an a misinterpretation of both visual storm structure and the radar data so one of the things I've done since this presentation is taken a much closer look at this part of the storm because chasers are still saying that this is a mesocyclone I'm under the impression that this is an inflow band storm chaser Quincy vagal has the shot at 2259 looking Northwest what what we're calling the mess Cyclone here but I've plotted it on top of the actual velocity data here at that time Quincy is running a GoPro it has a 90 degree field of view so using Google Maps I can plot his exact location I can plot the actual viewing frustum on top of this velocity data to see what are what actual part of the storm he's looking at so the centerline of his camera is actually looking across the most intense inflow winds in the storm so he's not looking at the center of a velocity couple like down here he's looking at the inflow half of a mesocyclone so to me that's the big takeaway lesson here is Quincy is not looking at the mesocyclone he's looking at the inflow notch the inflow portion of this storm so this is not the area where you would expect a big tornado to come out of it would be further south here where this rear flank downdraft is meeting this inflow here so I think this is pretty significant and important to point out that chasers are misidentifying storm structure and they're misidentifying the radar so this is something that we need to work with chasers to help them correct how do you find rotation on radar you want to look for where the red and the green meet right the red pixels and the green pixels that's where stuff is spinning but it turns out that the orientation of those red and green pixels is important too so if you draw a line between these two pixels it should parallel the radar beam and that indicates rotation because your winds are flowing around in a circle around this velocity couplet so what's going on to the northwest here where chasers are calling this the meso is this line is not parallel to the beam there's it's at an angle there is some rotation there but there's also significant convergence here so what this is telling me here is this is actually a part of the storm where you'd have converging winds curling into the north side of the mesocyclone we'd call an inflow band the storm pulls this inflow band in and it kind of feeds off of this area a convergent inflow band area off to the north and it's being mistaken for a large mesocyclone chasers are taking their escape routes to avoid it they're looking for tornadoes there and unbeknownst to them the danger areas to their south where the actual tornado is and they wind up driving directly into it so here's kind of what's going on at the surface at the lowest tilt of radar we have a velocity couplet associated with the tornado a tornado vortex signature very small less than a kilometer in size off to the north we have this convergence rotation area on the inflow band but I think chasers are kind of over looking the bigger picture here because if you go up a couple degrees on the radar beam you get a much better picture of what the actual mesocyclone of this storm is doing so here we have a very large area of rotation ten kilometers in diameter so this is a big big storm there's a mesocyclone that's six miles wide here so chasers are worried about ducking and dodging these smaller what I would probably call a tornado cyclone scale features or tornado vortex signatures but they're actually inside of and in an immediate path of a much larger mid-level mesocyclone so I think that broader picture is being overlooked here in terms of what's going on in this storm I plotted the rotation of this storm here stepping backwards from the Lawrence ef4 and then going back all the way from before the EF to here to figure out where are the rotation signatures where are the convergence signatures on the supercell what's going on here here's the pattern that emerged from this data there was a track of rotation from Southwest to Northeast and then before each tornado started to the north there was a strong area of convergence that became more focused convergence and rotation and finally tight rotation when it merged into the track that's where we had each tornado spin up so pretty neat pattern what's causing that I don't know this is speculation on my part but what I think is happening here is the super cells main updraft is tracking pretty much in a straight line and before each tornado the storm is taking a deep breath basically there's a big inflow surge here on the inflow band and the storm draws that in as focused rotation along the inflow band that inflow band merges with the Northeast moving supercell and when it does that's when the tornado spins up so we see this pattern before each tornado forms probably a supercell cycle but there's one main mid-level mesocyclone tracking along this line so pretty neat and it's kind of cool is this rotation these tornadoes had a little left hook right at the start of their path we saw that with the EF 4 that formed up here but it was really neat to see it on the EF 2 so the same pattern both tornadoes so kind of a glimpse into what what the structure on the supercell is doing so looking for other analogues in the literature there is a paper in the AMS journals you can look up online I think it's a really good case study at what might have been going on inside of this storm here if you're interested in some of the more nitty-gritty meteorological details but seeing basically the same pattern this is the May 24 2011 El Reno Oklahoma supercell so this produced an ef5 tornado it was actually a small tornado merger with this event just like we saw on the Lawrence Linwood Kansas storm from May 28th so and the brief the velocity pattern is very consistent similar to this other storm convergent inflow beyond on the north and then occluded behind the rear flank gust front is this velocity couplet here so we have the EF 5 in progress here we have an area of convergence off to the north and then that becomes more focused as rotation as these frames progress here and eventually we get a merger of two velocity couplets so pretty neat to see this pattern show up in other places here so storm chasers on the storm very similar structure it's really tough to see what the lighting here but there was a great big rear flank downdraft core inflow band off to the north very similar structure to what we saw with the with the tour group here The Chaser on this did an amazing job spotting this so I was actually really happy to see how he's reporting this he's I correctly identified this as the rear flank downdraft this as an inflow band off to the north and he says I've seen funnels form on inflow bands like this before and indeed that's what happens here here's this video shot this is an inflow band feeding right to left into the storms mesocyclone here this is a developing tornado and you can see these streaky bands of rain that's like the rear flank downdraft wrapping around this tornado that's the Bears cage so this tornado is coming in from the north moving into the Bears cage region here so yeah he has these great little notes here and he suspects without being able to see that there's a tornado there is an ef5 in this rain he can act he can't see it but just looking at the structure here the inflow band the motion of that funnel cloud he's deducing hey this thing's moving more like a satellite I think there's actually something much bigger in the rain here and he's right the rain clears a little bit and this pass is just to his salad think that's a tornado so ef5 tornadoes quite low and actually the other little tornado that he saw form you can see it coming around the back edge here it's a satellite now orbiting into the main circulation what we saw on the velocity scan there these couplets emerging holy crap [Music] so the main takeaway here is that he was able to identify the structure he was looking at he didn't freak out and say hey that tornados to my West I'm gonna get south and get out of the way of this thing because if he did he would have driven straight into this thing a much larger much more intense ef5 he could have been killed so my hope is that we can give chasers the tools to be able to identify the structure on these kinds of storms say hey you're looking at an inflow band you're not looking at the mesocyclone this large circular region of spiraling rain bands that is the Bears cage that is where the muscle cyclone is operating that is where the main tornado is going to be located okay so don't take your escape route into that part of the storm it's extremely dangerous so another person who has been studying that may 24 2011 storm intensely dr. Lee Whorf up in UW Madison he produces these amazing supercomputer visualizations of these storms so if you haven't seen dr. Lee's work go on YouTube as soon as you get a chance and pull up these videos they are super cool to see Hank has been collaborating with dr. Lee he's giving him actual storm shots of his own and comparing them to the models that dr. Lee is using and it's amazing the to sync up perfectly and you can really see the real-world structure reflected in these supercomputers equations of this particular storm May 24 2011 in all cases when you trace the air with trajectories when you drop these little parcels you put them in front of the storm they'll enter the updraft but they won't go into the tornado the parcels that you drop in the Col pool especially certain regions of it they take a beeline right for the tornado and get pulled up into the tornado circulation now the fact that we're not seeing any air coming from the warm side to feed the tornado is an interesting result and if it turns I think dr. Lee is practical cause you're a supercell there in any facet and paint has purple that that off and there's a pattern that's at work on the storms your animations are suggesting there's a lot more to the inflow tale than just a thin cloud streaming into them cyclamen yes first of all the fact that it produces a tail cloud is good because tail clouds are common in super cells along the fourth length they're not always there but that interface is where a bunch of interesting things can happen let me talk about a couple of the things we've found in our simulation that I don't think has been seen in mother nature we have found very interesting organization of vorticity in the cold pool of our simulated storm and one of the features we've identified or at least we've give it a name is called a stream wise or tissa T current and this is sort of you could call a helical e flowing tube of air it's sort of lifted tilted into the storms updraft where it becomes rotating cyclonic Li in the same direction as the air in the mesocyclone and any subsequent cyclonic tornado so this feature is one that shows up in our simulations of the 24 May 2011 environment in all the simulations we've done so one of the tools that we have used with our simulation is to place these air parcels sort of like chaff you just release them every second or so in a certain region of the storm to see where that air will go we'll follow the temperature the humidity the precipitation and the pressure along the path of the parcel and the forces acting on it and that's a very powerful method for trying to untangle the physics of what's going on in vortices along the forward flank that merged together that sometimes just a skid assimilated into the cyclonic flow of the main tornado if they're anti cyclonic they get twisted around the tornados periphery and spun and stretched and tilted and all sorts of cool stuff I know that some observational studies by Blue Stein and Mormon and some of those guys have shown that these vortices are out there you can't see with the naked eye sometimes they'll spin up some dust if you're lucky but oftentimes there's all these vortices in the air that we cannot see with our eye I'm thinking of creative ways to use videography like what you produce Hank are there ways for us to get some more information from the video if you're lucky enough to get something kicked up some dust and all that then you start to look at the full three-dimensional wind field when you're underneath the storm and let's say it starts off and it's got kind of a linear mode and then you see that RFD start to march around you know it's usually go time and yep that's when you position and then it won't be long offi and throttling around oh well really why we generally hate that where there is a mechanism in tornado genesis but it might be all of these things working together that are also driving the ark D it could be the SVC like you say that's driving the RFD in sync coming around perhaps perhaps we've raised a very good point it's it's a matter of correlation versus causation I mean this is still the leading theory of turning to Genesis is that a downdraft impinges the ground it spreads out like a downburst does it forces convergence of existing vorticity and once you get it stretched boom there's your tornado now even if the RFD is an important source of tornado Genesis I don't see how down drafts in the rft can maintain a tornado because the RFD is a very sporadic place it's not like there's this constant stream of downward air going down nice and smooth it's much more transient and these down drafts happen all over the place in their RFD so perhaps there's something else going on that is causing the rft behavior and causing the tornado you know so the RFD is more of a symptom than a cause and again I don't know that I'm right all the features move and behave like the organelles if you will I've seen in the field the rolling plumes of the updraft totally goddess in the background to the actual simulation wall cloud appears dr. Lee is making it's like side by side comparison to me it's absolutely mind-blowing and the tail clouds streaming it along the Ford flank these are the same patterns we're seeing on that May 28th storm Avenue that hits a storm changing of the mesocyclone and the demarcation into the turbulent I think dr. Leah we kind of figured out the actual mechanisms behind it so I just thought it was really cool and kind of important to point this out that these are the same processes that work under the motor cortices the horizontal or seize riding up the tornado the way the rft wraps around the tornado and sometimes clears and wraps again again same patterns we're seeing on this storm that impacted chasers I think this is just a great visualization of how these policies work and what they look like so my hope is chasers can identify these kinds of things these these shots and and and identify these patterns here this inflow band off to the north what chasers thought is a mesocyclone is it probably closely associated with dr. Lee's stream-wise four tissa tee current so you're getting vorticity that's being funneled into this large doughnut shaped mesocyclone here it makes this very nice comma head pattern and that is where your tornado is gonna form is right at the end of this comma head pattern so you can see this pattern persist through the life of this storm the entire length of the EF to the start of the EF four and then well into the iya iya for here for a long time we just have this very consistent comma head pattern and what I think you're seeing here is the actual structure of the mesocyclone reflected in the reflectivity data here so and again this this inflow band off to the north I think it's playing probably a pretty significant role and in the tornado formation itself but it's also a great landmark for spotters and chasers to get their bearings on this storm and figure out where they are and where the tornado is so here's the the old-school conceptual model lemon and Doswell 1979 and this is great still valid today the tornado forms at the end of an occluded gust front here where the rear flank downdraft meets the forward flank downdraft I think it's kind of stuck in a lot of chasers and spotters heads that the rear flank downdraft is south of the tornado the tornado is not buried in this RFD but I want to try to stress that when you're working with these giant HP supercells these are the most dangerous types of storms that there are that tornado is often buried really do inside of that RFD this is where you should expect it on such a storm as much as three miles behind that big circular green precipitation core in the rear flank downdraft that's where you're gonna find the tornadoes on these storms not up here in the clear air under the inflow not on a big HP storm that tornado is often buried right down there at the bottom of that hook so and I think chasers might be overlooking that expecting maybe there's going to be a tornado up here and disregarding this is just rainy rear flank downdraft so to me that's one of the more important takeaway lessons from this event so again it's really tough to look at velocity data in the field and say oh there's a convergent inflow band up here and where's the mid-level mesocyclone no I don't want chasers to be doing that I'm my hope is that chasers see this scene here and they say hey I've got good bearings on supercell structure here's my rear flank downdraft gust front the inflow notch is here I know where I am relative to where the tornado is going to be I'm not relying on the radar data for my safety because I think that's going to get you in a lot of trouble saying okay here's the Bears cage region where that big circular core is the gust front the inflow band maybe I need to get a few more miles spacing here is a safer alternative for my chase route a more risky maneuver would be to cut north across that path now because it's kind of a race to get in front of that thing so again going off of these visuals rather than your radar data to get your bearing bearings here's that bears cage just coming in looming over these chasers the the tour group now at this position here in front of this storm I'm as a chaser thinking hey maybe this is a good time to abort turn around and head back before I get run over by this thing I'm much more dangerous trajectory would be to keep going north into the path of this thing but they actually make it there in a ahead of the Bears cage region here now looking south you can see it's actually crossing the road here and to me this is one of the most critical safety lessons that we've learned storm-chasing this is what's getting people hurt and killed out there is it's this moment here where they decide I'm in a dangerous spot I need to take my escape route and what they're doing is they're trying to head back south to clear air or East out ahead of the storm and what they're doing is they're crossing the immediate path of the tornado and the Bears cage region and in doing so they're racing this freight train across the tracks and they're getting hit by it so you can get away with this on a small tornado but a big giant HP like this people are getting run over people are getting hurt and killed so this is what we saw on the El Reno storm we're still seeing it this is why I still stress the safety lesson here is don't go south across the path of that region take a moment to see where it is visually don't cross the path so and again these are my big safety lessons here is look for that visual structure identify the dangerous parts of the storm and keep your keep a safe escape route that does not cross the pack the other big takeaway lesson is if you lose your situational awareness you also need to take that escape route away from the storm so and my safety videos and have to do page seminar this is what I've been preaching over and over again because I still see storm chasers falling victim to this I'll just wrap it up with some safety stats I tried to come up with how dangerous is storm chasing Dan Robinson put together this chart of storm chaser fatalities in the last several years here I think he did a great job here it's really interesting since 2005 when we started really seeing more there have been seven driving related fatalities with chasing and so here's the kind of the accident rate per year that we're seeing here what's cool about this is we can compare this to the national average of eleven point seven and we can use these numbers to come actually estimate how many chasers are out there on the road so if storm chasers are kind of paralleling the national average accident rate I'm guessing there's probably about 4,000 chasers out operating on the road so it's a crude estimate but it's probably within an order of magnitude I'm guessing and we can use that adding in the store related fatalities it turns out there has been five over the years and bringing us to a total number of 12 we can actually figure out how dangerous is storm chasing compared to other activities and I - I was actually kind of surprised by these numbers they might be a little bit high somebody needs to check my math on this but according to these numbers storm chasing is actually quite dangerous more dangerous than scuba diving way more dangerous than skydiving and rock climbing which turns out are actually relatively safe is actually much more dangerous driving down the road on any given day than it is to go skydiving believe it or not it seems like a scary activity but the accidents are pretty infrequent turns out jogging it's quite dangerous you wouldn't think so but like people get hit by cars all the time so climbing Mount Everest okay there's your high end very very dangerous paragliding very dangerous yeah storm chasing it sits up there on the rankings I was surprised to see this to be honest so I think storm chasers safety is a very important topic if you're gonna dedicate your life to it like I'm doing it's something that we need to figure out if I pay attention to and figure out what mistakes chasers are making this is the 2013 elrina storm this is Mike Bettes he's about three minutes from getting rolled by this tornado his vehicle is gonna get smashed it's gonna have people in this group injured and the crazy thing to me is he identifies the tornado he identifies which way it's moving and then she drives directly into it why I it's my personal question girl why chasers are doing this and how it can stop accents from this so you see one of my main takeaway lessons here is when you see something like this stop okay I'm correctly identified the structure this is the Bears cage and where the tornado is gonna be find a fixed point of reference time like a telephone pole and then see which way is this thing moving okay it's moving right to left is it moving left to right is not moving at all it's not moving at all it's coming right at me and I need to take my escape problem you can see very clearly this mass is moving to the left it's gonna cross to Mike Bettes is left to his south that's the direction he decides he needs to escape she goes directly into the path it says though my advice to chasers is to stop just take a deep breath don't panic the world can see which way this thing is moving and then do not take an escape route across the path here because this is what's killing chasers this is why I do this right I don't want to see any more friends out there get killed I'm not trying to pick on people I'm not trying to say hey you really screwed up here you shouldn't have done that because these guys are gone and we can't get them back I don't want to see other friends make the exact same mistakes and now they're gone too that's my main motivation for doing this so is to help going forward correcting chasers not make fall into these same traps and so my main fear with this latest event is we have people saying that this is the mesocyclone this is a wall cloud Paul's favorite thing to point out and identify on storms but it's a it's a mistake this is an inflow bad and this is the main danger area of this storm so I'm hoping that the people who are out there representing this community who are in a position to educate chasers a role model who people are looking up to they are correctly identifying this and educating chasers because I think people are mistaking this structure for a mesocyclone they're saying hey this is just a rainy downdraft to the south this is the main danger area here I think that's really really wrong and we need to correct it or else there's gonna be more injuries and deaths out there instead this is what we need to be identifying in this situation we've got an inflow bag and the Bears cage region here again this is not a totally safe part of the storm tornadoes form here there's severe weather here but my main takeaway lesson is this is a secondary area of danger this is your primary area of danger that bears cage area should be avoided or else you're risking injury or death and it's imperative that we by this region here so I love John Davies he's a role model of mine I've talked a lot about him at the new page seminars in the past he went way out of his way to critique my last presentation which was pretty awesome but unfortunately I think he's he's got it wrong here and as much as it pains me just to speak up against speak out against the people that I admire the most I'm just terrified that if we don't correct this misinformation that other chasers are going to get hurt and killed out there this video in particular is talking about a previous close call that silver lining tors had with the Joplin dia five back in 2011 go and check out this video on YouTube it's this really dramatic gripping footage and to me what this highlights is that there is this pattern of behavior where storm chasers have just this gut edge to to head south across the path of this tornado here and I'm seeing this over and over and over again as there is this pattern of behavior where when chasers need to flee they're cutting south across the path so I'm seeing the exact same thing here with the Joplin storm that this Silver Lining group store is done again here they're starting north of the path after the tornado has already been on the ground for a long time it's been in progress for many minutes again another giant HP supercell and they're gonna cut right across the path of it here so I'm just trying to point out that the stakes and behaviors that chasers are making because they keep doing it and if they keep doing it people are gonna get hurt and killed out there so and again this is the Joplin storm visually identifiable structure in flow bad tornado to yourself inside the info notch north of the tornado you do not want to be taking a southbound escape route across the path of this thing so that's that's my main takeaway lessons for these types of events is don't flee south across the path of this thing use those visual bearings and if you don't have any visual bearings you shouldn't be there in the first place okay because you don't have situational awareness so yeah why is this important I actually some flack for this he's saying hindsight is 20/20 and your Monday morning quarterbacking here I think people are trying to dismiss the safety message here what we're doing is is not critiquing chasers and their past behavior what I'm trying to do is develop generalized safety advice going forward that chasers can use to not make the same mistakes because what we're doing what we're seeing is we're seeing the same patterns again and again in supercells chasers making the same errors so that that's the goal of what we need to correct here and and these are not once-in-a-lifetime incidents it seems like every other year there is a giant HP and there are close calls just in the past ten years here's a partial list of storms where there have been storm chaser accidents with damage to vehicles injuries and even involving tour groups so the most infamous event of course was El Reno there are actually tour groups that had some extremely close calls on that event and that's where we saw the injuries and the deaths but since then there have been other close calls with tour groups injuries and and so yeah this is happening a lot more than people think and storm-chasing has a level of danger that I don't think people are realizing and so yeah the other big thing is why are chasers doing this why are they cutting south across the Bears cage why are they driving into tornadoes I don't know there's there's got to be a mix of reasons this is the best I can come up with some of them simply don't know any better they need to be educated some of them are panicking and they have this knee-jerk reflex that they have to get out of there and then I'm hoping that most of them are this it's just I made a wrong turn I lost my bearings I wound up in a bad part of the storm that I shouldn't have been because when chasers are doing this more often that's a correctable thing that's happening less frequently users usually chasers are focused on getting out of that situation these are the extremely dangerous ones and I worry about the most it's where people are cutting across the Bears cage their core punching that rear flank downdraft because they don't want to lose their positioning on the storm if I don't go south now and get back to clear air the chase is over that's it we're done chasing or they just don't see the danger in the situation we've done this a hundred times we haven't been hit yet it's fine we can keep doing it this is what I hear this tour group saying and it's extremely dangerous it's like playing Russian roulette to me you couldn't spin that wheel so many times but if that number comes up and it's game over so I really want to point this out and then this is one of my last slides here just to kind of tie this together here in terms of stormchasers safety trying to figure out who's that most at risk here and and maybe how we can correct some of this but I try to plot as best as I could chasers who are in danger relative to their experience level how much they're putting themselves out there in the paths of these tornadoes and into the Bears cage region and how aggressively they're changing or chasing and what we see here is those who are most at risk are in the most danger of becoming a storm chasing casualty it's the people who chase the most and are chasing the most aggressively so and this is what we saw on El Reno it's the people who are deploying probes into the paths of the tornadoes the twist ex-team and then on the other end of the scale is the opportunistic locals people who don't know what they are doing they don't know storm structure they're waiting till a high-end event comes very close to them and they're gonna jump in their car and try to see it so these are the people most at risk of getting hit and killed by a tornado I think and so this is kind of counterintuitive you normally I think you'd think that your risk goes down as you gain experience but what's happening here is that the more you chase I find that the more aggressive you get I have to get that shot it's the last day of the trip my clients haven't seen a tornado we have to get in there and find a tornado for them or I need to get my shot on the news I need to get the money shot so it's the it's the pros who are putting themselves in harm's way more often I think they're actually putting themselves more at risk and I want to say hey you don't have to do that you don't have to cut across the Bears cage there's no good reason to do that for a crappy shot of an HP tornado that people are going to forget five minutes later so my hope is that we can help people who are becoming putting themselves more at risk saying hey why don't you dial it back a notch why don't you take a look at the mistakes you're making not fleeing south across the Bears cage and also on the other side of the spectrum helping the beginners and the newbies get to these more admitted intermediate level areas where they're not putting themselves at risk because they've learned the ropes there's always some inherent danger and storm chasing but my hope is that by identifying these mistakes and educating new chasers on storm structure that we can get chasers more towards this sweet spot at the bottom here where their risk is minimized because there's a whole lot of unnecessary risk taking out there and that can be totally avoided so that's my safety message spiel and thanks for having me guys thank you skip I'd like to take a few minutes for questions Rick you've got something outstanding it was really excellent one quick actually two quick questions but I'll make this first one real short the Kansas City radar was probably 60% further away from the Lone Star Lake Kansas tornado whereas the Topeka one was probably 40% closer did you notice that maybe the direction of the beam from the Topeka radar may have been kind of blunted out from picking up the smaller tomato vortex signature I looked at both Topeka and Kansas City just seeing which site had a better fix on the couplet of the impacting tornado and Topeka by far had the best fix on that tornado I was getting much more a Kansas City was farther away Kansas City was closer to the the last half of that ef4 that hit Linwood and but further west where the storm chaser accident occurred I was actually getting much better resolution off in Topeka so real quickly then the next one you talked about these horizontal streamer vorticity what was the last part of that yeah the streamwise for Tiffani current that dr. lien has identified as that although that area is pretty flat some of your video showed some mountains in the background and there is a slight upslope about 400 feet from that part of northern Kansas into maybe the parent cell do you think that may have had some slight increase in the ability for that streaming to get up into the storm terrain absolutely plays a big role in tornado Genesis even on a small level absolutely and when your eye fascinated by dr. Lee's talks it's like rounding error in the map he's doing has a huge impact on what storm comes out of his models so I know that in real life it's little things like terrain differences which are acting like that noise on that kind of level that are definitely playing a role in and what the storm eventually does with the tornadoes so yes it is but what and how and why I have no idea so yeah hey skip hi okay I can't hear it from here are perfectly positioned in the dead spot when NWS did their investigation were they able to procure GPS tracks from the various parties involved um I don't know how much The Weather Service actually looked into the actual accidents I think they just noted the damage that had occurred at the time and the locations and the severity of it I don't I don't think they did an accident investigation so I think that's I didn't put this in the talk but I think that's why it's important to do this because if if amateurs like me don't do it then nobody does we don't know what happened on these events we don't know what went wrong so yeah I don't know if they got any GPS data or not so this is not my area of specialty I'm a microbiologist but if a tornado and you were driving in a tornado or going in the same direction yeah can you generally out drive or tornado or not yeah um so there's a very famous video I think it was 91 right and over and and so in the video there's kind of this this moment we're like we can't outrun it we can't do it and to be honest I think they could have outrun it they're on the interstate you can go pretty fast it's very very rare for a tornado to go as fast as you can go down the interstate the exception to that is if there's traffic so if this traffic starts backing up and there's a tornado behind you and then you've got a problem but but generally yeah you can drive faster than a tornado if you're out in the open the main thing though is if you're in a residential area an urban area or if there's traffic then you've got a big problem so to me the main thing is clearing the path especially if you're a spotter chaser get out of the path of that and just avoid being in that situation in the first place that's paramount or gravel road maybe yeah you shouldn't if you're in this position where there's a tornado behind you you know and you've got no other options and you're running in a traffic you've already to me made several mistakes and I want to help people identify hey you shouldn't be driving into that storm there's a watch there's a warning that you overlooked and now we're at this now we're literally a last ditch effort here considering leaving the car for the ditch or trying to outrun this thing so to me it's all about avoiding that situation let me just make a final comment here because this kind of interesting skip is and not only do I have a problem with chasers relying on the accuracy and the precision of radar because that's is a dangerous thing there's there's offset to place based on the elevation angle there's interpretations that are wrong I've seen plenty of times where the storms have this bent back occluded front that goes back and the torn a new tornado forms further to the west which is what this reminds me of so relying on radar with a limited temporal and spatial resolution is a dangerous proposition I also think that a lot of chasers now rely on it so much that they put themselves in places where they don't think about what the visual would be one of my most common things when I'm out chasing is people go well what's that I don't know I'm not sure and and I see a lot of chasers who think they know everything of what's going on the storm and somebody who's done it for 30 years there's times I'm like I don't know just watch it for a little bit I'm not sure it could be this and it might not be that and it could be the wall cloud over there or it could be tucked back in there or there could be a secondary circulation and it's amazing how many things are different in reality than what I would have conceived them in my head yeah and I think that's a dangerous thing that's why you know we we try to get people to chase with others more experience for a while just keep in mind I'd like to have again if you're interested in chasing this would be a great trip to go on this trip number one our assistant is going to be Dave Carlson who's one of the lead forecasters from the Prairie Storm Prediction Center which is the Canadian equivalent to our SPC it's a great chance to learn a lot of this stuff we run in to make his Hank and skip out in the field quite a bit so talk to us skip that was a great thing I would one more thing I do want to say about skip and it kind of reminds me of being young is that sometimes it takes courage to be outspoken and to take an opinion and I admire that because you're doing it not to attack you're doing it to talk to people about loot loot lowering their confidence and going into a little bit more precaution I think what you've done and the way you say things is really fantastic so thank you for thanks Paul [Applause]

Channel: College of DuPage

Views: 27,037

Keywords: COD, College of DuPage, Community College, Illinois, AMS, American Meteorological Society, Chicago Chapter, Skip Talbot, Storm Chaser, Storm Chasing, Tornados, Safety, weather, thunderstorms, graphs, accidents, videos, storm, severe weather, pecoshank, fluke, spin, band, bear cave, national weather service, meteorolgy, EF4, Kansas, EF, EF2, EF3

Id: e1pXsdG8X9Y

Length: 88min 8sec (5288 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 11 2020