AccuWeather meteorologist shares his story chasing

AccuWeather

AccuWeather Meteorologist Tony Laubach captured one of the first tornadoes of Friday's outbreak in Nebraska into Iowa.

Transcript

00:00 Unfortunately, the severe weather threat is not ending just yet.

00:03 We've had tornado warnings, severe thunderstorm warnings across Texas, Louisiana,

00:07 but the big story overnight has been the flash flooding.

00:10 Now, the severe weather is expected to continue through Thursday of this week

00:15 as we're tracking dual upper-level lows.

00:18 The threat area will be from Texas toward Minnesota.

00:21 And we spoke with Tony Laubach live as he was tracking a tornado on Friday,

00:26 and here's a little bit of footage from that Friday tornado capture that he caught on cam.

00:31 Orange cell. So what are you observing?

00:36 Well, a very large tornado. We're just getting it on view here on the stream.

00:42 I'm going to get zoomed in for you here. There you go, live look.

00:45 Tornado emergency. Tornado on the ground right now.

00:48 This is just to the south of Uraling. This is a very large tornado.

00:51 We're kind of in some hilly terrain here, so you got to bear with us.

00:53 While we get to a safe place, we can get a view on this thing here.

00:56 But yeah, you're going to come and see it over the hill here.

00:58 That is a large, large tornado here. Again, apologize for the terrain.

01:03 We're looking for a clear spot to shoot this.

01:05 But yeah, Jeff, this is ongoing right now, that tornado emergency.

01:08 We are verifying it here live on the AccuWeather Network.

01:11 A large tornado on the ground. This would be near the Panama area,

01:14 south of Uraling, heading toward Highway 59.

01:18 This is a very, very large tornado. We finally got a place here to stop.

01:22 We're going to go ahead and do that right now, get you centered up here.

01:24 This is it right now here, guys. Large tornado.

01:26 This is probably a wedge, maybe half a mile wide.

01:30 That is a very large tornado that is coming in over the hill right now.

01:33 This storm has had a confirmed tornado.

01:36 And National Weather Service survey teams continue to assess damage paths

01:40 from Friday's tornadoes in Nebraska and Iowa,

01:42 and they're going to be surveying storms for the next week here into other states as well.

01:47 AccuWeather meteorologist Tony Lovac joins us live now under a blue sky in Wichita, Kansas,

01:51 to talk about one of the first tornadoes of Friday's outbreak in Nebraska

01:55 and then into parts of Iowa as well.

01:57 Tony, that was an amazing capture that you had.

02:00 Ultimately, that tornado then passed closer to you about 10, 12 minutes from that moment.

02:07 So tell us about that experience.

02:12 Well, Jeff, that was one of the more incredible tornado experiences we've ever had.

02:15 And we mentioned it there as we were doing the back and forth during that tornado.

02:19 The view that we had coming in from the north.

02:21 Typically, you want to chase these things.

02:23 You want to come in from the southeast to get a view on this.

02:25 So it was extremely rare to have such a pristine view of that from the north

02:30 while that tornado was coming at us.

02:32 That tornado occurring right about 6 o'clock is when we started putting that on air.

02:36 But we're going to backtrack because this was an all-day outbreak.

02:39 In fact, the tornado we're going to show you here has been rated by the National Weather Service in Hastings.

02:44 It was one of the first tornadoes of the outbreak that occurred just after 12 o'clock.

02:48 National Weather Service in Hastings rated our first tornado that we saw in EF3.

02:52 We'll show you some of those numbers right now.

02:54 That occurred between 1258 and 121 p.m., rated EF3 with peak winds of 145 miles an hour.

03:03 It was 600 yards wide.

03:05 And that tornado traveled just over 9.5 miles to the north and northeast.

03:11 My chase partner and I, Ed Grubb, made an intercept on that one.

03:14 We're going to show you some of that video here.

03:15 As we were coming up Highway 11 in Nebraska with this tornado coming in up at us here,

03:21 you can kind of hear us doing some back and forth here.

03:23 One of the big reasons why you love to have a chase partner in the car

03:26 is to give you that second set of eyes and call things out as we are working our way up.

03:30 I was driving at the time. Ed was doing most of the shooting and doing most of the spotting for us.

03:35 As we worked our way up very, very close, we were easily within a quarter mile of this

03:38 as this crossed the road in front of us.

03:40 Very powerful RFD, rear flank downdraft.

03:43 Those are the winds that wrap around the tornado.

03:46 Ed and I have many years' experience actually taking measurements of the RFD.

03:49 When we were back doing work with TWISTEX,

03:52 our main job was to get as close to the tornado as safety permitted to measure those winds.

03:57 And essentially, that is what we did, minus the instrumentation,

04:00 to spot this tornado as it was rolling across here.

04:03 As it crossed the road, the RFD actually took out some power poles, knocked those down.

04:08 That was separate from the actual tornado itself, although the tornado did do some damage.

04:12 Some EF3 damage recorded just before the tornado crossed the road, hitting a farmstead,

04:16 and then continued to do EF2 damage.

04:19 Hastings, the National Weather Service office there,

04:22 that was right near the center of the low-pressure system.

04:25 That's where those early tornadoes formed.

04:27 That was kind of our initial plan, and then as we went through the day,

04:30 we worked our way east and actually came in around the north side of the storms

04:34 that were responsible for the tornadoes in the Lincoln and Omaha areas.

04:37 And we intercepted several tornadoes in Iowa from those storms,

04:40 including the one that we saw live on the AccuWeather network.

04:43 As we mentioned, damage surveys continue.

04:46 Really, we're all waiting to hear from the National Weather Service offices

04:49 in Omaha and Des Moines for those really big tornadoes.

04:52 That includes the Lincoln and Omaha tornadoes, plus the one we aired on the AccuWeather network.

04:56 Doppler on wheels, this is unofficial, and we don't measure tornadoes.

05:00 We don't rate them based on wind speeds.

05:02 But the Doppler on wheels on that tornado as we were live

05:05 measured a peak wind gust of 224 miles per hour with that particular tornado.

05:12 There were sub-vortices within that main tornado, so we had the larger parent circulation,

05:17 and then we had sub-vortices that were spinning up inside that tornado,

05:20 some of those moving incredibly fast.

05:22 Likely, that is what ticked that measurement there, 224,

05:25 very reminiscent of the El Reno tornado back in 2013,

05:29 where we had the 2.5-mile-wide main circulation,

05:32 and we had the individual vortices spinning within it,

05:35 and those were responsible for most of the significant damage during that tornado.

05:40 Likely, the similar situation here.

05:41 But National Weather Service offices are expecting by about 3 o'clock

05:45 to start releasing some of those information on those tornadoes,

05:48 again, the Lincoln-Omaha tornadoes and the Harlan tornado that we had here live on the AccuWeather network.

05:53 So, scientifically, we're waiting for a lot of results from these particular tornadoes on an outbreak

05:58 that certainly will go down in history as one of the biggest we've seen,

06:01 at least in the last decade, for sure, guys.

06:03 And from a data standpoint, it reminded me a lot of the Moore, Oklahoma tornado from around 1999,

06:09 I believe it was, that passed really close to the radar site.

06:12 This one tore through an area very close to the Valley, Nebraska radar site,

06:16 so it was sampled really well.

06:18 It was like it had a great set of eyes on this and amazing footage,

06:22 but also the radar data was just off the charts.

06:24 Tony, thank you so much for all your chasing and reporting and so forth,

06:27 and Tony's going to be back with us again at 10.30 Eastern, 9.30 Central.

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