00:00We do want to go over to Tony Law back now, and Anna, you and I were watching his footage
00:04here
00:05just before we stepped out of the break. We saw something live. It was pretty compelling.
00:09Yeah, he's near Pontiac, Illinois, and not only him, we've seen a lot of storm chasers.
00:14They're all in the right spot. This is where we started to see the first action as far as
00:18potential tornadoes. So Tony, what are you seeing out there, and what did you just observe about
00:22eight or ten minutes ago? Well, Jeff, like you mentioned, we had a tornado that briefly
00:28touched down. That would have been just to the north of Pontiac. It moved north of town and
00:32eventually kind of northeast. It was on the ground for about three or four minutes, never fully
00:36condensed, but intense cloud-based rotation, had multiple ground swirls, probably a large
00:42multi-vortex type circulation, throwing a lot of leaves and field debris around. But when it crossed
00:47the highway in front of us, it was not strong enough to take down any power lines. So a weak
00:52tornado, but the first one of the day, which we logged here. Right now, we're monitoring two areas
00:58of circulation. The one you're looking at here, right over the white building there on the
01:01bottom left-hand corner, we've got kind of the broad, what was the original circulation
01:06that was responsible for the brief tornado we saw about ten minutes ago. That's still
01:10pulling up clouds, even though it looks like it's notably detaching from the main updraft base
01:16itself. Off to my right, which would be off to my east-northeast, is another area of rotation
01:21that is trying to develop right now. So kind of in a cycle, it tends to happen with these types
01:27of supercells. You get a storm, produces a tornado for a while. When that tornado lifts, that area
01:32of circulation detaches on the back end of the storm, which is what you're looking at right now.
01:37You still see some of the motion there in the clouds, but a new circulation forms just a little
01:43bit further to the east. So I believe that's what's going on right now here. This tornado warning
01:48goes until 530. I know it says radar indicated at the moment, that is true. But again, this storm has
01:54produced a tornado. So this storm does have a history of producing at least one tornado there
01:59on the northeast side of Pontiac. So if we look further down the line here, you're talking campus,
02:05cabaret, those areas up in there are probably next in line. And there's probably some pretty
02:12good hail with this as well. I've seen some hail reports indicating maybe an inch, inch and a half
02:17in diameter or so. In addition to the tornadic threat, which right now is not happening, that's
02:23good. There is still some hail with the storm and a pretty intense core here that will be north of
02:28the tornadic area. So Emington campus, as I mentioned, Hersher Union Hill, you're going to be
02:36maybe looking at some hail here as the storm works its way in. So again, we've already seen one tornado,
02:42we can confirm that. We've got the video in-house there, so you'll probably see it. Again, nothing
02:46visually impressive and certainly a weaker tornado, fortunately, but came down just after the storm
02:52passed north of Pontiac. So we are on the first significant storm threat, the first significant
02:58tornado threat. And myself, and as you mentioned, about 500 of my closest chase friends all passing
03:04here in front of me as well. So plenty of eyes on this storm. We'll keep you posted.
03:10All right, Tony, good stuff. Tony, briefly, I want you to just take our viewers behind the
03:15scenes a little bit. Storm chasers on the ground. Jeff showed one of these storm reports about
03:20the tornado touching down reported by a storm chaser. Tell our viewers a little bit more about
03:24how you guys are able to help the National Weather Service with the ground truth behind
03:28some of these warnings. Yeah, Anna, that's an easy and a great question to answer. National
03:35Weather Service, they're stuck in an office, they're watching radar. Unfortunately,
03:38radar doesn't always tell the story of what's going on at the ground. The further you get away from the
03:43radar, the more, the higher the beam of the radar is. So it's intercept intersecting higher in the
03:49storm. So you might be looking three, four thousand feet up in the air on radar. What we do here
03:54on the
03:54ground, we can confirm that in that particular tornado, which was very, very weak, probably didn't
03:59even show up on radar. So we're able to let the Weather Service know that, hey, this storm is rotating.
04:04It has produced a tornado. We confirm on the ground with human eyes what technology is unable to do.
04:11All right. Thanks, Tony. We're going to continue checking in with you
04:14throughout the evening as severe weather continues.
Comments