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Severe WX May 2019 Plains Severe Event

Might have another significant spinup developing near Sapulpa. Scary night in Oklahoma
 
Oh goodness that's RIGHT over Sapulpa. Of all the sparsely populated farmland in Oklahoma...
 
Couplet has weakened but it's passing through a highly populated area; if it's still down we will know about it.
 
Power flashes along its path. With that and the debris sig, definitely had something down there too.
 
The debris signature did not appear to get bigger after moving through Sapulpa so that’s great news! There was a lot to tear up there.
 
Creek County, OK (where Sapulpa is located) scanner mentioning house collapses and injuries. Doesn't sound good.

Edit: Not sure how accurate this is, mostly just hearing about downed trees and power poles now.
 
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Moderate risk by SPC today. I'm going to tack on a few more days to the thread title. I'll add more if we need it past the 28th but we can start a new thread for June.

day1otlk_1300 (1).gif
 
Absolutely a strong spin up can occur in a line (I’m learning more-so today). Postel (on TWC) showed the radar with a strong LINE of storms then you see the velocity of spinning winds and BOOM debris on the correlation coefficient (during the El Reno tor).
El Reno is a city that will always bring to mind May 2013 but wasn’t there an EF-5 in 2011 or what year?
I pray the fatalities stay low but I’m worried they’ve not found everyone, they were using dogs at the motel.
 
That debris signature was massive when it popped up and I actually thought it was some sort of multi-vortex structure. The signature was over a mile wide, so there was definitely something different about this tornado.
Lori said:
El Reno is a city that will always bring to mind May 2013 but wasn’t there an EF-5 in 2011 or what year?
Click to expand...
On May 24, 2011 the Piedmont EF-5 started west of El Reno and passed just North of town on a 63 mile damage path that lasted over 105 minutes.
 
That's unreal. What a devastating place for a strong spin-up. This is why I never sleep when there's even a mild line of storms approaching and there's any low level SRH whatsoever. Terrifying.
 
It's a shame that people have kind of forgotten the 2011 EF5 in El Reno. That was an amazingly intense tornado, probably at least as strong as the April 27th EF5s.

But yeah, I don't know what you can do about this from a meteorology/emergency management standpoint. These things spin up for one or two scans, so it's not telegraphed like it is with a supercell and you're usually warning after it's already formed. Aside from a violent tornado tracking down a major highway or directly into a major city, a strong nighttime spin-up in a vulnerable area is just about your worst-case scenario in terms of preventing injuries and fatalities.
 
The casualties in this case absolutely can't be blamed on anyone imo; the couplet spun up so fast that a longer lead time warning was impossible, and there was barely enough time to really shelter effectively with that short of a notice. This one came from practically nowhere. It's not like the line had a history of producing lots of tornadoes or tornadic signatures.
 
Oh, yeah, for sure. Unless there's some sort of hard-to-imagine improvement in technology and understanding of tornadogenesis that allows us to somehow predict QLCS tornadoes in advance, this is going to be hard to avoid. Even if people are awake it's going to be hard to get warnings to them in time.
 
Yeah, I honestly don't think it will ever be possible to totally prevent tornado casualties in worse case scenarios such as these. Even in daylight this spinup happened absurdly fast.

1759
 
Rated EF3. These are some CRAZY stats. Now compare those stats to the 2013 El Reno tornado and realize they're rated the same.

It was only on the ground for two frames of the RS loop above.

 
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