The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
-Psalm 19:1

Do you know that God controls the clouds and makes his lightning flash?
-Job 37:15



Monday, April 26, 2010

Tornado Outbreak in the south 2010

OK, so I knew that Sunday was going to be a sad chase day in our neck of the woods, so we decided to try to seize of Saturday's horrific outbreak what we could. Unfortunately, we were tied up until 2:30PM, but as soon as we were finished, we hopped into the geared up minivan and headed north and west. There was a little bit of feed off the Gulf that looked to be firing off of Mobile. I had hoped that by the time we got up to say Columbus, we would still have daylight and the cells would still be firing. There was a steady line from Mobile, up into central Georgia. Unfortunately, it was only severe warned at the southernmost part. Only the line that produced all the devastation with the 97 mile long (potentially up to 200 mile long) track of that devastating tornadic supercell, which appears to have dropped tornadoes along its path from Louisiana into Georgia. Unfortunately, that does include the horrifying EF4 tornado, which stole 10 lives in Yazoo City, Mississippi, as it ravaged that town and many others along the course of that tornadoes path. Rick, Alabama Mike, Sarah, Jeff and Jim were in Tuscaloosa waiting on a different tornadic cell, but it passed by to their north, just to their north. You can see on the map above, that these storm paths were very long tracked. The detailed of the storm reports further tells of the devastation. It's humbling to read of what happened. My thoughts and prayers go out to all those impacted, especially those who lost loved ones.

Starting out the chaseSo, my wonderful groom and I, with radar support from Storm Chasing Mikey (our Virginia member of the Southern Weather Brigade). He offered valuable updates and advice for the best possibility for intercept, given the less than optimal circumstances. We headed northwest on Highway 19 out of Thomasville, with the goal of Columbus, knowing full well, we were racing against daylight's end. The plan was to make it up to Albany and reassess. We got to Albany, and Mikey and I reviewed the radar to see how things were tracking. It was 6PM. We only had a couple of hours of daylight left at best, so we decided to cut harder west and hope that the system ejected a little farther east and south. We knew that by the time we got to Columbus, we wouldn't be able to see anything, so we headed to Georgetown, and we planned to make it as far as we could to re-evaluate the situation. Unfortunately, we made it all the way to Eufaula, AL, and we saw a whole lot of nothing. GRL3 wasn't cooperative in Eufaula, giving me about 20 minutes of delay on radar, but regardless, it looked like everything was well to our north and we were out of daylight. It was a wonderful adventure though. Chattahoochee River behind us. We're in Eufaula, ALAccording to my wonderful groom, "A bad day storm chasing, is better than a good day of yard work" (which was our original plan for the day. lol!) We saw a lot of wonderful things, and got to visit the Chattahoochee River and the beautiful bridge passing over it. In Georgetown, the gas station attendant was warning my wonderful groom about the approaching weather, and he told her we've been chasing after it all day. She told everyone in the gas station to listen up that he was a "real live storm chaser"! LOL! No, we didn't see anything. Are we surprised? No, not really. We learned that there is a whole lot of nothing between Albany and Eufaula, except some strangely placed water towers, and people get very curious when they see a person in a storm chaser hat in their town. Here's what we saw:My daredevil groom living on the edgeMy wonderful groom picking yummy blackberries
This water tower was smack dab in the middle of the highway!Yep, and that's all, folks. Sunday, as expected, everything ejected up into the Carolinas, causing more destruction up that way as the storm virtually missed us. I say virtually because a tree did happen to fall on my wonderful in-laws' house, Tree on my wonderful groom's parents' house--fortunately looks like minimal damage...and my wonderful groom had 1/4" hail fall on him at work. I resisted the urge to chase despite the cool scud and my wonderful groom's hail.my wonderful groom's hail compared with a quarterNo, I still haven't seen any...

For the rest of the day on Sunday, we bid farewell to a dear friend and chaser pal of ours. I'll make a separate post for that.

Have a great day!
~Dewdrop

2 comments:

  1. Seemes like the GR3 radar data failed a lot of people during this past weekends outbreak. Does anyone know why the data stream failed so bad?

    SCM

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rick told me that on the forums, they were saying that the server failed from all the people trying to access that data. I find that surprising.

    ReplyDelete

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