Severe thunderstorms raked the Plains this week in the first significant outbreak so far this season. Dozens of tornado reports were submitted to the National Weather Service and storm chasers lined the roads in Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska.
Vicious thunderstorms impacted parts of the Plains Wednesday, sparking over 200 reports of severe weather. While the tornado threat was lower than on Tuesday, large hail and microbursts caused headaches in southwestern Oklahoma, where winds gusted to 106 miles per hour around dinnertime in the town of Frederick. Elsewhere, flash flooding snarled area roadways, and a few low-end tornadoes touched down.
Storms quickly congealed into a line shortly after developing, reducing the overall tornado risk. When storms become linear in nature, they consist of a long line of updrafts and downdrafts. The storm is like a snowplow in the atmosphere, shunting air ahead of it upwards and out of the way. With squall lines, the primary threat becomes damaging straight-line winds.
Occasionally, a few individual thunderstorm cores within a squall line can become stronger and draw in more air, causing kinks in the squall line. Surface wind direction comes from the southeast in these regions, contrasting with the winds from the west behind the line. The change in wind direction over such a short distance can occasionally cause brief, quick-hitting tornado. That’s exactly what happened in Norman, Okla., shortly after nightfall Wednesday.
I had spent all day chasing the storms, but didn’t seem much. You can imagine my surprise when, after giving up for the day, I waltzed into my hotel near Oklahoma City around 9 p.m., only to discover we had just been placed under a tornado warning.
The National Weather Service surveyed the damage around Norman the next day and determined the tornado was an EF-1.