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Hurricane & Tornado Anniversaries

Today is 20 years since the tornado outbreak of March 12, 2006. High risk verified pretty well although it looks like the densest concentration of tornado reports was actually a bit west and south of that contour.

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Meteorologically it's best remembered for the "Six-State Supercell," which formed in Oklahoma, clipped Kansas, crossed all of Missouri and Illinois, northwest Indiana, and dissipated in Michigan. However the strongest (lone F4) and deadliest (F3, 4 deaths) tornadoes of the outbreak actually came from the storm to its north.

Not many chasers have memorable shots from that day as the mentality of chasing anything anytime, anywhere wasn't really a thing yet, let alone live streaming. Most chasers still confined themselves to the Plains (and for some, the Plains specifically west of I-35) in April/May/June, and night chasing was a definite taboo unless you had the equipment and IT skills to finagle reliable mobile data with the infrastructure of the time. Skip Talbot was one of those:

 
Kds86z said:


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Hesston was one of the iconic tornado clips in all the documentaries of the early-mid '90s, along with many from the Andover outbreak the following year, as portable video (as opposed to motion picture film) cameras had only just become widely available and good quality enough to be popular with chasers and the public alike.
 
It's also the 10th anniversary of a localized tornado outbreak in the Midwest on March 15, 2016. It produced three EF2s including this one which my chase partner and I glimpsed as it tracked just northwest of Hanna City, IL around 7:50 PM. Depending on my mood I consider it my first "chase" tornado, although it can't be confirmed from my footage alone due to ground contact obscured by the tree line (that and due to the darkness I was running my camcorder in its 4 FPS "night vision" mode). My chase partner and I were not really expecting a tornado by that point since our storm appeared to be about to be swallowed by a line. Between that and the darkness it was a bit of a "brown pants" moment and we hightailed it out of there before we could get a better shot.

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trivoli-tornado.jpg

 
It's been five years to the day since the last High Risk without a violent tornado candidate.

Quote only partially unrelated:
UK_EF4 said:
Interesting post. My takes are about both the March 2021 risks:

To this day, I think the 45% on March 17th 2021 was one of the weirdest SPC decisions of all time. Even ignoring hindsight, when I look back at the models for March 17th on the HREF archive, I am puzzled that anything higher than 15% was considered for the tornado forecast. This was certainly a case where an event being spotted early and seemingly initially impressive built hype that led to over forecasting at Day 1.

The kinematics were just unimpressive... the trough was not moving overly quickly and the 500mb flow was just 50-60kts over the warm sector during the event. Dixie in early spring heavily relies on powerful LLJs, and across AL the LLJ on the day was in some spots lower than 40kts. The most favourable environment was further West in MS - where sustained discrete convection struggled (and was modelled to do so). The model signal was for copious discrete storms to develop early across AL in the Eastern half of the warm sector (which happened) but as stated the environment was not close to high-risk level and so the strongest tornado was EF2. Had the trough ejection occurred earlier near peak heating the story would be different, imo. But given the lack of CAM signal coinciding with the impressive environment, the 45% let alone 30% seem very out of character for the often conservative SPC.

I think March 25th 2021 was almost the opposite. Admittedly, I have only been tracking setups in detail since about 2019 which is not that long in the grand scheme of weather but that day was and still is the most impressive setup I can recall happening to be honest. The agreement for an extremely high end environment across N MS/AL was literally unlike anything I can remember... literally of the charts.

View attachment 49484

What was even more ridiculous was for literally all CAMS to have a very strong signal for multiple robust, discrete supercells through that environment. Almost every CAM's simref looked basically like 4/27. Even the NAM which notoriously favoured linear modes over anything at that time had a line of discrete cells. I think the SPC was well within their right to go 45% or even higher, and I say this with hindsight. I truly think the only reason the 45% wasn't issued was the failure of the one the previous week to verify. The way the initial round of storms was more significant than expected and managed to save MS/AL from storms utilising the peak parameter space a couple hours later I still think about often. Even then - the event managed to produce multiple intense tornadoes that were destructive. That event was driven by a quick moving shortwave rather than the larger scale troughs you tend to see with major outbreaks (which is what made 3/15 this year look so scary until D1 when timing seemed a bit off).
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3 years ago, the most powerful tornado to hit Los Angeles in 40 years ripped through the Montebello District at approximately 11:30 am, on March 22, 2023, severely damaging 17 buildings and causing one injury. The high-end EF1 tornado had winds up to 110 mph and lasted for half a mile, ripping the roof off the Royal Paper Box Company warehouse and throwing an HVAC unit into the air. It was the worst tornado in LA since 1983.

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Lake Martin EF4 said:
Welp I missed the 3/25/21 anniversary, but luckily its biggest tornado occurred after midnight on the 26th, so I can at least not be inaccurate when I say that today marks the 5 year anniversary of the Newnan, Georgia "EF4". It is the most recent violent tornado to not have any clear funnel pics exist.
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That means it’s been five years since James Spann’s house got hit by a tornado.
 
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