ANALYSIS: TORNADOES South of Garden City.

Radar Grab and below is the tornado that my dad witnessed at the same time I captured the radar.




Moisture Convergence


Surface Based Cape


1-KM Helicity


3-KM Helicity


ThetaE Advection


Surface Vorticity and Surface Cape


Low Level Lapse Rates

My dad had a successful chase today out in eastern Kansas, south of the Garden City area. He saw multiple tornado/landspouts today as I nowcasted him around the storm and provided updates. I took a bunch of PNG files from GR but I cant seem to get them to show up. The storm my dad got on took a classic right turn into the surface flow and had an amazing hook. Above I put multiple maps showing real time data as the tornadoes were dropping. I outlined the area where the tornadoes developed and from diagnosing today I figured it was the area of high Helicity values, the storm motions and high Cape values(3000J) that helped this storm produce when it did.

MC.

PHOTOS/VIDEO: Low Topped Supercells in Southeast Colo.

I decided to chase southeast Colorado where a nice cold core supercells were forecasted to be. I ended up chasing two separate lines of low topped supercells that produced small hail and some nice wall clouds. I ran into Mike Umscheid a few times but never got a chance to say hi. He got on some more supercells latter in the day that produced some tornadoes.

FORECAST: 4/15/09

I decided to do a quick forecast to see where the best storms are going to fire and looking at the latest mesoanalysis there is a sfc boundy/dryline setting up in eastern Colo. This could act as a focus for storm initiation and possible landspouts due to the high surface vorticity.