19 year anniversary of this event in Iowa today.
Weather, science, and math enthusiast in Denver/Boulder area. NCAR for my day job.
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Chris R
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@alanschenkel structure is great. Hail cores not so much. I got a few dents yesterday as well…whoops
@wxdox My chase partner and I both work in vortex dynamics research, and we thought maybe we were seeing a whole "vortex sheet" breakdown with all the dust. Once the Akron storm got strong enough, it appeared to stretch the vorticity of some of those vortex sheet vortices into tornadoes; at least that's my hypothesis at the moment.
@wxdox Ah! So what we saw on the left was indeed another landspout -- we weren't sure but your vantage point is more convincing. Nice catch!
After abandoning storms SW of Bennett, we dashed northeast to new convection firing near Akron. We unfortunately were stuck behind heavy precip on the backside of the storm and just were out of reach of the AKO tornado, but on that same storm, we found a relatively "intense" landspout tornado on the young storm. The last of the 4 photos below shows the impressive convective structure on the backside of the storm with the dissipating landspout beneath.
Russ SchumacherAs thunderstorm season ramps up, check out our Colorado severe weather climatology page, now updated with data through 2022! Explore the interactive map of severe weather reports, and see when different hazards are most likely during the year. https://climate.colostate.edu/severe_wx_climatology.html #cowx
Tuesday - Thursday this week is looking like one of the more interesting stretches of severe/tornadic weather close to the Front Range (within a 1/4 day drive) I've seen in some time potentially. Now I will prepare to eat crow for such an audacious statement.
@stormdig Awesome catch! I was about to head out there, but I was signed up for a trail race early Saturday morning in Ft Collins. It was a Sophie's choice choosing between my two loves. I let a well-rested Friday night win the battle of my soul. Hopefully we'll get another couple opportunities close by this week.
The 18Z NAM HiRes is coming in hot with rotational updrafts near home tomorrow. I'm not terribly optimistic or certain the thermodynamics will support a robust chase day wrt surface-based supercells, but I may head out to NE CO/SW NE (or possibly KS) if tomorrow's observations suggest adequate destabilization for sustained surface-based convection.
