Interesting morning. Was woken up by phone alert about tornado warning, which was followed seconds after by the sirens kicking on. Luckily nothing happened, but that was a wild start to a day.
North Tulsa got hit, but nothing major. Tulsa area schools are closed again today, most likely due to the flooding
lomcevak, is there one metric that really stands out to you in those soundings? What are the major indicators that the atmosphere was primed for tornadoes? /not a meteorologist
The Storm Relative Helicities in the 2nd box in the bottom stand out to me. The surface to 1km SRH of 389 and surface to 3 km SRH of 529 are both extremely high values. From the SPC, SRH's of greater than 100 (for SFC - 1 km) and 250 (for SFC - 3 km) are sort of a baseline for when tornadoes need to be considered as a potential threat, but the higher those numbers are, the greater the risk generally is. Look where that observed surface to 1km SRH value of 389 would fit on this chart:
One thing that does strike me as a little odd with that sounding is the relative lack of DCAPE, with only 121 J/kg of DCAPE measured. That isn't a value that you would really associate severe weather with - compare that to the 810 J/kg in the Birmingham sounding in the twitter thread above. And frankly, even that Birmingham number is just decent - 1000 J/kg is typically what I want to see for an elevated severe risk. However, that parameter is more associated with severe wind gusts than it would be tornadoes, so I don't think that is necessarily the cause for why things may not have panned out as expected.
There’s a wildlife reserve in Strafford, MO that had damage from the storms today which knocked down some fencing and there’s a fucking lion on the loose.
Days like yesterday fascinate me. Such an incredibly ripe environment that just did not produce to it's ceiling. Failure modes man....
What's also fascinating about yesterday are the possible explanations...many of them valid and entirely plausible. The fact that so many have a myriad of opinions lends credence to how fickle severe storms forecasting (or really any forecasting) can be. We had such a volatile atmosphere yesterday, but it didn't take much to screw it up. Days like 27 April 2011 are truly extraordinary.
Also the 15 year anniversary of the Hallam, NE EF4 tornado. Reached a max width of 2.5 miles at its strongest.
They're releasing 250,000 cubic feet per second from the dam upstream of Tulsa. They're about to flood a bunch of the southern suburbs.
We're getting there. They'd never released more than 120,000 cubic feet per second from Keystone Dam before this, and we're expecting more potentially severe storms this evening.
Data from the research projects is going to be such a key thing for future. We have dodged several major bullets this week. It is bound to swing back around.
Nah man the SPC is the worst ever. Kill them at dust. Wish more people understood what the SPC does. There is a reason they issue only watches.....