"A Tale of Two Cities (Forecasts)"...

(click on pics to enlarge)

Short blog today as I crashed extra early yesterday and am now playing catch-up for all the things I put off doing! Who, ME, procrastinate???

Thankfully, I awoke to a radar that was active outside our viewing area, warnings a-churnin' along the Savannah River Valley, and that's fine with me. We had the Severe Thunderstorm Watch go up in the mountain counties just before 1pm, which then spread into the Piedmont by 4pm. I do believe our mini-cool wedge helped keep the atmosphere above us more stable, hence lack of widespread storm problems last evening.

However, a tornado warning popped around 9:30a on the south side of Asheville for a small but clearly rotating cell. Unimpressive on the radar in every way, but there. Mountain T-warnings are unusual in that the uneven terrain is not favorable for the development of funnels, though the Asheville area is in the rather broad French Broad/Swannanoa River Valley. Late yesterday afternoon I saw a T-warning pop for Ashe County, which has quite the rolling topography. The shot below is roughly 15-20 miles to the northwest of where the warning came down (taken last fall):

Here is the radar scan from that cell, the T-warning outlined in fuschia...

When I did a 3-D scan, there was little of note to see; too, this area is a bit far from the radar beam, so there was a lot of missing 'info' in the lower reaches of the storm. Compared to the 3-D scans I blogged with yesterday which had strong development up into the purple and white velocities, this one was only up into the red. All that to say I have no impressive 3-D scan from that warning. HOWEVER...

One of the many tell-tale things you look for in a doppler radar scan is a 'couplet'. Basically, reddish colors in a 'velocity' scan indicate winds moving away from a radar, and greenish colors indicate winds moving towards a radar...and where you have a clearly defined red-green 'point' of sorts, you have at the very least rotation aloft. Whether it makes a funnel that reaches the surface is another matter, but check out this beautiful couplet that is as 'clean' an example as I've seen in NC tornadoes in quite some time...

The brighter the colors, the stronger the winds...just a beautiful velocity scan of that T-warning cell. They also had serious rainfall issues in Ashe County, with mudslides and flooding reported in several locations. Rains started early in the morning in Ashe and Watauga Counties especially, so by the time the late afternoon big dawgs rolled in they made for a serious mess...

Following is a 'storm total' grab I took at 1am today...sorry I don't know the length of time for the image, but it gives you an idea of the overall widespread storm coverage we've had lately:


The National Weather Service made their official assessments yesterday of the prior day's potential tornado damage in NC and SC...at last check they had classified 3 tornadoes, one EF-0 and two EF-1s. There may be more detailed info yet to come down, as well as a graphical index I can share with you on the blog; I just made a quick check and only came up with short written confirmation reports, so I'll go snooping later today.

Time to head 'em up and move 'em out, as they say. Oh yeah, the blog title 'inspiration'...I have models that say zero storms today, and one that says a 20% chance...and at the moment I am seeing a Storm Prediction Center covering us in a "slight" severe storm chance for today which has me putting storms in the forecast, albeit few in number...the PM met has been going 'dry' for two days, and I feel compelled to keep chances in the wording...will toss my proverbial weather coin and call heads or tails in a couple of hours after some new data comes down....wheeeee!!!

"Holy Tornado, Batman!"

Literally minutes before turning in for the night for this morning's shift work at WSOC, a tornado warning popped for the storm that had just passed on the west side of Cherryville in NW Gaston County. The problem with the cell was it's not-terribly-fast movement and the explosive nature in which the cell grew.

The following are images I quickly grabbed from my Gibson Ridge Level 2 data radar system feeding from GSP National Weather Service office. The time was roughly 6:15p through 6:35p, though I mistakenly didn't save all of the screen image which had the actual scan time. The purpose of these grabs is simply to let you look at a powerful storm and see some neat features that came out as a result...this is by no means a scientific, 'official' discourse, just a weatherman-heading-to-bed-who-had-to-tear-himself-away-from-the-radar-because-he-needed-to-sleep-and-couldn't-do-anything-about-it-anyway type of moment., kapish?

(click on pics to enlarge)

Just a rough approximation of the storm cell that headed south and a tad east yesterday around supper time...I-85 is the red line dropping down to the left of Gastonia, and Highway 74 is the yellow road running west through Shelby, FYI. Kings Mountain is at the bottom of the yellow circle where 74 splits from I-85.

When a radar image has substantial 'white' in it, it is producing a good bit of hail, and probably at a decent size. We refer to these as "hail cores"....

Within each color 'level' (white being stronger than purple being stronger than red, etc.), I can still manipulate through the intensities...and noticed a strong growth at the top of the storm indicating very cold temperatures and significant freezing in this cell intensifying...

Soon enough hail was reaching the surface, along with damaging winds and a strong likelihood of a tornado on the ground. One particular scan of the storm as it neared the Kings Mountain area was noting 3.7" hail aloft...ouch!

As I switched to scanning the purple intensities, it removed the significant hail core...and you can see straight through the storm to the surface below. Yet more proof in the pudding that this was a serious tornado-producing storm , with the funnel somewhere at the base of this tube...

One could argue for two likely funnel formations...the strongest with the hail core, but also a potent vortex to the left, SE edge...

Same image as the previous one, just a bit of re-shading and positioning...

In stepping back to the red levels, which are strong enough indicators in any storm, notice how the mass aloft is narrowed to a more specific area in the lower altitudes, stressing again the focusing nature of the winds in this cell...

While the hail shaft is not showing up on the surface coloration, this cell was still in tornado mode...

And with that I had to force myself to go to sleep...nothing like getting all worked up when the 1am alarm is a mere hours away! I hope the following link works, which is a nice representation of the local storm reports made on this storm. More reports will be made after daylight comes this morning, for sure:

STORM REPORT GRAPHICS

We're not out of the woods just yet, but I need to wrap this up and head into the station. Have a great and calmer day!

"Do You Like Severe Weather?"

The above pre-dawn radar grab is a "storm total" rainfall throughout the greater Triad. While generated purely on estimating algorithms within the Doppler radar, it gives a fair representation of the widespread rainfall the region received Sunday through midnight. Especially heavy were the rains up in the NW mountains along the TN border with Ashe and Watuga Counties.
(click pic to enlarge)

What I don't have images to show you were the overnight storms in the southern Piedmont around the Charlotte region, where massive slow-moving thunderstorm conglomerations produced several warnings, reports of large hail, but most impressively cells which had 4,500 to 5,000 lightning strikes per hour...a light show to beat all light shows.

Needless to say, the radars and our forecasting bodies here at News 14 have been worked a great deal lately. The development and behavior of severe storm cells is oftentimes fascninating, watching outflow boundaries spawn new storms that blow up in 15 minutes, cells converging, cells diverging, cells rotating...there is a mysterious beauty and sacred reverence in watching if not experiencing classic storms...yet we all know they can cause a great deal of damage.

I'm going to give you a really neat link that will take a lot time to play around with...that is, if you like tornados and clicking buttons. The website is a super-data base housing archived tornado data from all over the U.S., and is chock full of data...combined with GoogleEarth 4 (which you can download for free), you can fly the path of the storm. Pretty neat views when you zoom in closer in an area (use scaling tool in the upper left to zoom). As you can see for yourself, there are myriad parameters you can select...have fun playing around with it:

TORNADO PATHS

Luckily, our overnight storms were not rotating here in North Carolina. Stay tuned this week as I will (hopefully) have some neat "art" to show you of my recent dabblings...it won't be tomorrow, but later on this week.