Tornado-warned supercells tear across Texas

AccuWeather

AccuWeather's Tony Laubach provided a live look at a supercell during an ongoing tornado threat in east Texas on the evening of April 4.

Transcript

00:00We're looking at the base of this fiercely rotating cell here, Damien, look at that.

00:03I had my mic muted, guys. Go ahead, Tony.

00:08Can you hear me now? All right, sorry about that. Yeah, we had a muted mic. Oh, that was a beautiful

00:13shot there. We are basically watching this. This is the north side of Linden right now. We're

00:17looking basically off to the north-northwest, still an HP supercell right now, and you're

00:23getting kind of the front edge of this. We've actually gotten a couple of miles ahead of it

00:26here. I'll bring this out as wide as I can get this camera here just to show you what the sky

00:31looks like. This is certainly a very, very impressive, very, very dangerous, very, very strong

00:37storm that we are tracking right now. Again, you just see this incredible, incredible view of this

00:43thing right here is, again, from the north side of Linden, we're looking to the northwest. The area,

00:49the lowering you're seeing in front is kind of, I would say, on the leading edge, probably what I

00:52would say the gust front would be, not necessarily the wall clouds. So right over that red building

00:57there, right between those two buildings with the white roof, you're seeing kind of an area

01:01of lowering. Might be an area we'll be watching here, I would say, just based on how the storm

01:06is organized. I would definitely say, I don't know, maybe I'm being premature with that. I'm

01:10kind of seeing some darker areas roll in. Let me get in tight here for you and show you exactly

01:14what I'm looking at. Zooming in and right in between the buildings here, you see right just

01:19off to the right there, if you're looking at the building with the white roof, just kind of that

01:22little lower area, does not appear, at least not on my camera, to be rotating right now. But again,

01:28this is probably going to pass just to the north of Linden, south of Douglasville, if we're going

01:34to see this thing regenerate. It really kind of seems like it's weakened just a tad. I know they've

01:39kind of dropped the warning text a little bit here, but we're looking right up into the notch

01:45of this area. Again, HP Supercell, just absolutely incredible lightning, positive strikes is what we

01:50call these, out of the anvil. So most of the lightning you're seeing there flashing on the

01:55right side of the screen, that's coming out of the anvil out ahead of this particular storm. So

02:00very, very dangerous lightning that has that deep thunder with it too. But again, just ominous

02:06wall cloud looking feature here approaching. Again, this will be north of Linden that we are tracking

02:11the storm right now. Again, just an, I mean, incredible sky here. Best view we've actually had

02:16of this storm, believe it or not. East Texas, a lot of trees, a lot of hills. So we've been

02:21fortunate here. We've actually been able to get a pretty good view here. But Damien, it's been

02:25great. We call this old school. We used to have nowcasters back in the day. We've been listening

02:30to you here on the feed as you've been kind of rocking the radar here. So that's been extremely

02:34helpful. It's like having a nowcaster in the year back in the early 2000s before we had data. So

02:39we're going to keep an eye on this storm here. Again, we're watching this lowering possibly,

02:43maybe this will be tornadic. Again, we can't really tell. We've got some obstructions in the

02:47way. Looks more like scud than a tornado, even though on camera it looks a little ominous.

02:54Zoom in here, camera can tell us. Yeah, that's not rotating. So, but yeah, north of Linden, south of

03:00Douglas, Douglasville, I believe. Yeah, Douglasville. You guys are going to be in line for this. And

03:05again, we do know there's probably some hail in this as well. So we'll toss it back to you guys

03:09while we continue to watch this storm. All right. So we're taking a live look here at Tony

03:12Lawbox's picture there in Linden, Texas, and you can see what he's looking at there. That is the

03:17lowering. That's going to be the area of concern here looking forward. And overall, those are just

03:21kind of what we call scud clouds. Those are kind of like the unorganized clouds that are, it's

03:26actually technically moisture that's being pulled from the surface into the actual storm. So that's

03:32what's happening right there. All that moisture from the surface is being pulled up into the

03:36storm and it's condensating like a cloud would. And that's exactly what we're tracking. But for

03:40this view, what you're looking at right there, whenever it comes to actually producing a tornado,

03:44we'd like to see a lot more rotation. And that's not, we're not really seeing a whole lot of

03:50rotation, but you can see there on the left-hand side of your screen, there's a little cloud right

03:53there that's just now being pulled in to the actual storm. And that's what we're seeing is

03:58that we have moisture from the surface feeding in to these clouds. Normally we see little feeder

04:04bands. Those kind of look like beaver tails here if you zoom out here for some of these storms. But

04:08as of right now, Tony's looking at, if there's going to be a tornado in this storm, Tony is looking

04:12exactly where the tornado would be right there. So we're going to continue to track that. And Tony,

04:17just giving you an update here on what we're going to be tracking, looking at the overall

04:21shear track for this. The National Weather Service has this tornado warning going a lot more to the

04:26north than this overall path is showing. So it's looking like the overall path of this storm is

04:32going to continue on pretty much a 0-4-5 angle there. So it looks like it's going to pass to the

04:38south of Texarkana, pretty much moving right to the north of Queen City. So that's going to be

04:43the overall track passing to the south, it looks like, of that lake near Maud. So heads up for that.

04:48That's going to be the overall track. I would say that the, it's going to stay well to the south of

04:52I-30. So you don't have to worry about it passing I-30, at least on the Texas side. It may pass I-30

04:58eventually as it works its way into Arkansas. But this is what we're going to be watching here

05:02going forward with the overall track of this storm. But I will say that as far as if you're

05:07just now joining us, looking at the overall progression of this storm, one thing we do

05:11normally point out is that the difference in boxes and what we call these boxes are polygons.

05:17These are issued from the National Weather Service and their watches, warnings, anything like that,

05:21advisories. So whenever you see this purple box, that is a confirmed tornado warning. That means

05:26that a trained storm spotter on the ground had visual confirmation of a tornado on the ground.

05:32So that's why you see those purple boxes. However, over the past couple radar scans, you can see that

05:37that purple box has been replaced by a smaller, narrower red box. And the red box is your generic

05:45tornado warning that you would normally see associated and issued for a storm that produces

05:49this type of rotation signature. So what ends up happening, so what that means is that the visual

05:54confirmation on the tornado has been lost. So now it's primarily going to be a radar-indicated

06:00rotation signature with this storm.

Category

Transcript

Recommended