re: Tornado! Insane Deviant Tornado in Kansas

Small world. You are definitely my nieces cross country coach lol

Oh damn. Is it the one by the Y?

Pretty wild day yesterday. Storm kind of rolled in out of nowhere and tornado was on the ground fast.

Live on the east side of town about 4 miles from where it touched down. Sister was a mile away. Have hundreds of friends/acquaintances who were impacted or narrowly missed. The scene this morning is pretty bad that way.

In a really sad way, we've been due for this. For being "tornado alley", we haven't had a tornado in the metro area in a long time.

I had no idea so many people on here live near Wichita. My son plays at Butler and he and a couple of teammates rent a place in El Dorado. He and several friends were on his porch watching the sky when they saw it. Nevertheless there were 20 football players squeezed into his matchbox sized basement.

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It's bizarre to see the tornado against a clear blue sky like that.

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I don't think I've ever seen one like that.

man I hope it’s a long long time before we have one of these again. Junk was terrifying

What boggles my mind about Reed’s drone video, and maybe this just shows my inexperience with IRL tornados, is how the movement of the tornado is not at all consistent. We always hear things like “the tornado was moving north north east at 45 mph” and in my head that’s a consistent speed but that funnel was super jittery. It would move over on house and almost sort of stay there a few seconds then jump or skip forward 4 or 5 houses then sort of slow down again. Being under one of those would be bad enough let alone the mother fricker nearly stopping on top of you

This was a deviant tornado, so you can't really use it as a basis for the characteristics of the "average" tornado. Being that this one chose to frick right off from the parent supercell, it was no longer being influenced by that supercell's storm motion or other elements.

That said, what you see is more of an exaggerated representation of your average tornado. You can see the vortex breakdown and the cycle that goes with it. You can see an inflow feature that gets stretched into the vertical. There are the helical meso vortices that are evident. All of it is easily seen because the meso is all alone with no precip with great backlighting.

This tornado puts on display several of the concepts and theories that Dr. Leigh Orf is working on using super computer modeling. It will also be a great case study for deviant motion, the most deviant of deviant motions, that people like Cameron Nixon are studying. Having so much high quality video of this one is great. It was also in a good spot for radar, which is a miracle considering the trends this season of being either in a black hole or right on top of a radar.

As to the random nature of the damage you see, that is due to both the multi-vortex feature and the vortex breakdown process. When those new funnels form they can be incredibly powerful with very strong updrafts. When you see one drop and then the roof of a random home or building fly off, it is that vertical wind speed doing most of the heavy lifting. That's also what launched the many cars in all directions. If that wind can get under an object, it is going straight up. That's why cars are death traps in tornadoes, and the same principle destroys house trailers even with the weaker tornadoes.