Potential landspouts and massive walls of dust blow through Nebraska

AccuWeather

AccuWeather's Tony Laubach reported live from Nebraska on the evening of April 17 as rotating supercells led to landspouts and huge clouds of dust.

Transcript

00:00Tonight, he is live in eastern Nebraska as another stretch of storm chasing days begins.

00:06So, Tony, I know we've got some rotation here with this tornado-worn cell.

00:09How's it going out there?

00:13Well, Jeff, it's a dusty mess.

00:16In fact, I would say that we're probably on a potentially dangerous storm.

00:20I'm hoping to give you guys a view here shortly.

00:22I've kind of got my tail pointed toward the storm as I'm trying to get out ahead of it a little bit here.

00:27We're going to go right to some video here we've queued up here.

00:30These likely were land spout tornadoes.

00:33We actually had a couple of these develop just outside of Rogers, Nebraska.

00:37This was shortly before the storm picked up the tornado warning.

00:39Likely because of these, some cloud-based rotation was extremely evident with these.

00:45It didn't look like it was visually connected, but we certainly had at least two of these potential land spout tornadoes.

00:51You're looking probably at a wide shot from the dash cam that we were rolling on.

00:56But we certainly had at least, like I said, one or two of these, both of these straddling, one north and one south of U.S. 30 here.

01:04So this would have been near the Rogers area, so just to the east of Columbus.

01:09And I'm getting pulled off here, and we're going to give you a view of what this storm is looking like as we speak.

01:14Right now, there's a big plume of dust coming with this storm.

01:18We've seen winds, and I've experienced some of these here.

01:21If you want to switch back over to the live shot here, you can get a very good idea of what this looks like right now.

01:26And you can see just this wall of dust on this storm right now.

01:30This is probably producing winds that are close to, I would almost estimate, 60, maybe approaching 70 miles per hour with this.

01:37And it could be even stronger.

01:39But you can just see how quickly this is moving here.

01:42I'll get a zoom-in shot and kind of look at the ground features here and just watch how quickly this dust is overtaking the area here.

01:49So very difficult travel right now on U.S. 30.

01:52Again, this would be just outside of North Bend.

01:55I'm a little bit just to the east of that.

01:57You can just see, again, this almost haboob-looking feature here, Jeff.

02:03We see these a lot of times on storms that have gusted out here.

02:06We have reported a lot of heavy winds.

02:09Again, blowing dust right now.

02:10I would say that this is not tornadic compared to what it was a little bit ago here.

02:15This is a lot of outflow.

02:16And, again, you're watching this live as this dust is going to slowly start to overtake me here.

02:21But right now, this is the storm we are tracking.

02:24This is one of a couple of significant storms.

02:26This likely right on the cold front.

02:28So as this moves east, especially as it gets toward the Fremont area and then over toward the Missouri border,

02:34and we're starting to get rocked pretty good here.

02:35In fact, the gust of wind that just hit, Jeff, felt like the Hulk just ran into the side of my car.

02:41So we're probably looking 60 or so miles an hour right now with the wind that's associated with this.

02:47And, again, you're watching live here is this dust.

02:49Non-tornadic, I will say at this point, non-tornadic dust, but certainly is going to create plenty of hazards for travelers.

02:56Semi-trucks here on US-30 between here and the Fremont area.

02:59So we're going to back ourselves up a little bit here, Jeff, and we're going to move a little bit east to get back out in front of this thing.

03:05All right, Tony.

03:06Pretty cool stuff here.

03:07Maybe not cool for somebody with their windows open in the area, but that is pretty fascinating.

03:11And a lot of us in the east coast never really experience a storm quite like that with the dust being kicked up.

03:18Pretty impressive stuff there, Tony.

03:20And you're well positioned here, as always.

03:23Storm chasers try to stay on the south side of rotating supercells.

03:26If you're on the north side, you're going to get hammered with hail and the wind, and the rain's going to obscure your view.

03:31So he's on the south side, so he's got a good set of eyes on that.

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