Severe storms lead to destructive threats in the Plains

AccuWeather

AccuWeather's Tony Laubach reported live from Oklahoma on Oct. 30 as severe storms swept across the region.

Transcript

00:00The AccuWeather meteorologist and storm chaser Tony Laubach is tracking today's severe threat.

00:05Yeah, let's check in with him live in Manchester, Oklahoma for the very latest. Tony?

00:12Yeah, that's right, Anna. I'm in Manchester, Oklahoma, basically right on the Kansas-Oklahoma

00:16line. This would be southwest of the major town of Wichita, and we are tracking storms,

00:21lots of storms right now, most of them in the severe category. Haven't seen any tornadic storms

00:26yet, but we are tracking many of those storms. You wonder, we started this day in Kansas,

00:30and that was kind of the initial target, but we are starting to slide our way south into Oklahoma

00:34because the cold front, which was really going to be the trigger for storms in Kansas,

00:38is moving south a lot faster, and that is creating some issues in terms of the storm

00:43mode up that direction. We are going to be talking about, I'm going to kind of throw a

00:47line at you here. Let's see if this rings a bell. Sweep the leg. The reason I talk about that is

00:52because basically this cold front is doing just that. It is sweeping the legs of the storms that

00:56have fired in Kansas. I'll show you some video here just to kind of walk you through what's

00:59kind of happening up that direction, which is really mitigating the tornado threat. This is

01:03a shelf cloud. This is out of some of the severe thunderstorms that were near the town of Kingman,

01:08west of Wichita, about an hour or so ago. What you are seeing is you see cold air. A lot of times

01:13when you get a cold front, that's that cold air at the surface, and a lot of times as fast as that

01:17front is moving, that cold air sweeps out underneath these storms. When you get that cold

01:22air that pushes out ahead of storms, it pushes into the warm, moist air that those storms were

01:27feeding off of. That warm, moist air is then forced. Think of it like a snow shovel. As you

01:32drop it down your driveway, that snow goes up over the shovel and eventually down on your feet.

01:37That is what's happening with the warm air. It is going up and over the snow shovel that is the cold

01:41front. What that does is that makes it hard for any storm-based rotation to get down to the

01:48surface, really mitigating, if not completely eliminating the tornado threat in a lot of cases.

01:52In fact, my weather station and my car recording temperatures near 80 degrees ahead of that,

01:58temperatures in the mid-50s up above that. That is why we've moved south into Oklahoma,

02:02because we think the better tornado chances are going to lie with the dry line storms.

02:06You're seeing one of those behind me here. Notice the band. See that cloud

02:11band that's feeding in behind me here? That is an inflow band. We talked about the storms in

02:16Kansas being outflow-driven. It's got that cold air that is sweeping the legs of that storm.

02:21Here in Oklahoma, where it is warm and is moist and that cold front isn't coming through yet,

02:26you get it drawing in that warm, moist air. You see those bands of clouds that are feeding

02:31into what is a pretty hefty storm. In fact, this severe thunderstorm is a destructive severe

02:36thunderstorm, because 80-mile-per-hour winds and ping-pong-sized hail, this storm is warned for.

02:41This is the target storm I'm initially targeting right now. This storm right now does not look

02:45overly tornadic. We haven't really seen much, even in Oklahoma, despite warmer air and better

02:50instability down this way, to work with yet. We are really focused mainly on the damaging wind and

02:56a large hail threat. You see that storm. You see that warning. Again, that's going to be just to

03:00the west of the Enid area. That is the storm I'm going to be targeting here over the next hour or

03:04so. All right. Well, you break this down very well there. I like the metaphors as well, Tony.

03:08It kind of brings it to life and gives us all some good context on how to think about this,

03:13the anatomy of a severe thunderstorm with this kind of environment. Again, with the color-coded

03:19warnings here, your typical severe thunderstorm warnings are dangerous enough. Those are the

03:23ones in that yellowy-orange color, but the peach-colored severe thunderstorm warnings are

03:28the destructive severe thunderstorm warnings. And in the past five or six years, the National

03:32Weather Service has kind of added that option as an additional tag they can put on severe

03:36thunderstorms to communicate when there is unusually large hail or destructive wind.

03:42And here we've seen, again, the risk of damaging wind and very large hail with this,

03:46so we could see some screaming wind and large hail with this particular storm.

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