Storms in Nebraska produce multiple landspout tornadoes

AccuWeather

Storm chaser Tony Laubach explains what happened with landspout tornadoes seen in Nebraska on May 14.

Transcript

00:00So we're going to head to meteorologist and storm chaser Tony Laubach.

00:03Tony, you were in Nebraska chasing last night.

00:06Now you've moved on to Minooka, Illinois, west of Joliet.

00:09Put on a lot of miles, even by midday today, you're southwest of Chicago.

00:16Yeah, it was a long haul.

00:18In fact, you talk about the day in the life of a chaser,

00:20you're going to get a very documented look at what that typically is like.

00:24But if you want to know what a day in the life was for me today,

00:26it looked a lot like this for hours upon hours.

00:30Yes, I was in southwest Nebraska yesterday.

00:33We're talking almost 800 miles of real estate covered between yesterday

00:39and here I am just outside of Joliet right now getting set up

00:43for what is supposed to be another very, very active day.

00:45Not a whole lot to talk about right now.

00:48So let's talk about tornadoes because it is tornado week.

00:52And we'll talk about the land spouts yesterday.

00:54We call this, in chaser vernacular, a spout fest.

00:58Basically, it was a thunderstorm that was producing multiple land spout-type tornadoes.

01:02You've heard that term before.

01:04A land spout works a little differently than a typical supercell tornado.

01:09What you get a lot of times is circulation at the ground where you get converging wind.

01:14A lot of times creates little eddies, little circulations at the ground.

01:17When that happens under a updraft, that updraft will sometimes pull that circulation into the clouds

01:23and thus you have a tornado that essentially develops from the ground up

01:27and that connects that circulation to the clouds as opposed to vice versa,

01:31which we typically see the supercell generate that rotation

01:34and then you bring that rotation down to the ground.

01:36These typically are very weak.

01:38National Weather Service out of North Platte yesterday confirmed five EFUs.

01:43So, EFU is EF unknown, meaning these were very, very weak and did not hit anything

01:49and thus they received that EFU rating as opposed to getting a numbered rating

01:55that most tornadoes typically do.

01:57I saw several of these.

01:58I have to kind of go back and look at video to find the timing of these.

02:01During the course of my intercept, I was in places where I lost view of the tornado

02:06on a couple of occasions.

02:07So, a lot of times these land spouts happen pretty quickly

02:10and you can get one right after another pretty quick.

02:12So, to me, it looked like one continuous land spout

02:15when in reality it was several of them over the time of about 40 minutes

02:19when I first laid eyes on it until the time that that tornado eventually dissipated.

02:23But we are here in northeast Illinois, just outside of the Chicago area,

02:29expecting severe weather to ramp up.

02:31Coming up in the next hour, we're expecting a watch to be issued in this area

02:34or at least very close, guys.

02:35We'll talk about the conditions I'm currently in

02:38and how that might affect the type of severe weather

02:41that we're going to be looking for in this area in the hours to come.

02:46All right, good stuff.

02:47Meteorologist Tony Laubach.

02:48Tony, you know, you're going to be busy over the next, what, five, six days.

02:51We've got more coming in the next week, Damien.

02:53Absolutely.

02:54So, Tony, thank you so much.

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