Tornados (Again?!?)

[sterlingice]

About a year and a couple of weeks after a tornado ripped through Lawrence, we found ourself in another tornado warning earlier tonight. Fortunately, the tornadic storms kept south of us, mostly in unpopulated areas but that's not to say we didn't get some nastiness.

Check the linked pics as we had quite a bit of small hail and then lightning like I've never seen. It was striking multiple times a second for a good half hour so all I had to do to get pictures was just point my camera in the direction I wanted to shoot and click. Eventually I was playing around with longer shutter settings, etc so you get some fuzzy pics since I couldn't keep my hands completely straight.

And anyone who says technology is a waste of money, a lot of people got better advance warnings this year and they were much better at predicting the whereabouts of the tornados because of some new computer instruments (most notably the wind speed maps which caused them to spout the buzz word "hook echo" at least 5 times a minute).

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SI

[Ragone]

Yea it poured down rain here for about a good 20 minutes.. but it has been erriely quiet since then

[primelord]

Yea it poured down rain here for about a good 20 minutes.. but it has been erriely quiet since then
Well we should be getting what passed through you gusy any moment now.

[sooner333]

I just like it when they use tornado as a verb...like "this storm is gonna tornado at any minute".

[LionsFan10]

Man, makes me wish I saved the pictures I took of my Jeep almost entirely underwater, as Michigan got pounded on back to back days Friday/Saturday with some of the worst weather we've had in a long time. Tornado warning tripped once for us, the second day was just left overs, but still enough to flood our street again. I'm pretty frightened by bad weather, so all the pictures I had were after the fact, not during.

[ice4277]

Man, makes me wish I saved the pictures I took of my Jeep almost entirely underwater, as Michigan got pounded on back to back days Friday/Saturday with some of the worst weather we've had in a long time. Tornado warning tripped once for us, the second day was just left overs, but still enough to flood our street again. I'm pretty frightened by bad weather, so all the pictures I had were after the fact, not during.
Where do you live? I work in Dearborn, a lot of my co-workers who live south of Detroit got hit pretty hard.

[Wolfpack]

Thurs night was lightning and rain galore here in Ann Arbor. I came to bed right before the storm hit and couldn't go to sleep because the flashing was so constant. I could actually read my LED clock (which has no light) by the lightning. I finally went downstairs and turned on the TV to find out that Washtenaw County was under a tornado warning (though it expired a couple of minutes later at 1 AM). The odd part was the closest lightning strikes came after the rest of the storm blew through. About a half-dozen strikes hit within a mile of the house (based on the five-second rule) at the end of the storm.

Not too bad. However, Friday, the day when all hell broke loose in SE Michigan, I was safely bunkered in the interior of Rackham Grad Library taking a GIS workshop course. None of us was aware anything was amiss until our instructor got a call from his wife (I'm guessing) saying that we were having severe weather. I popped open a web browser to look at a local TV station radar picture and sure enough, a crescent of angry red had just blown through. We never noticed. According to my wife, it got to be as dark as twilight and then everything became green for a bit. The back-to-back rains clogged up a city drain pipe and we got water backed into the basement, but fortunately, we have a sump pump, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been, mostly just a little bit of water in one corner that drained away eventually. Even so, I didn't sleep a lot Friday night/Saturday morning as I wanted to "control" any flooding rather than have it just run out and let it go everywhere before draining into the sump pump again. We've been lucky though, as we haven't had any backups since Friday night. Of course, it's been raining this morning, but I don't think it's been nearly as heavy as last week. And, of course, we are much more fortunate that those down around Dearborn who basically had their streets turn into rivers overnight. Was there some sort of failure of the city's storm sewers? It's not as if Dearborn is in a flood plain, so I have wondered why so much water flooded the city.

[LionsFan10]

Ice, I just moved to Allen Park in November. I used to live in Dearborn, between Greenfield and Schaffer Rd. Where in Dearborn do you work?

[Simms]

With all due respect to the fury of nature, and as odd as this sounds, tornado season is one of the things I miss most about Kansas.

[sterlingice]

With all due respect to the fury of nature, and as odd as this sounds, tornado season is one of the things I miss most about Kansas.
I was talking to my girlfriend last night and I said "You know, when I eventually move away, I'll almost miss this. Almost." There's just something about having your night interrupted by nature and then spending the whole night watching tv, trying to watch everyone tell you how you're all going to die (or how you're going to miss it).

I was talking to a friend of mine on ICQ last night who's out at Cal Tech for grad school but he grew up in Kansas and went to undergrad here and his quote after I told him what went on was "I hope we get at least one good thunderstorm while I'm back there. The perpetually bland weather around here gets boring after a while." We're crazy people, I tell ya.

SI

[sooner333]

With all due respect to the fury of nature, and as odd as this sounds, tornado season is one of the things I miss most about Kansas.

We get our fair share of thunderstorms up here in the Chicagoland area, but really no exciting weather. I miss Gary England inturrupting my broadcast and telling me about the tornadoes and how some small town was in danger of getting blown off the map. I miss the choppers in the sky showing us the destruction as it was happening, or the stormchasers on the ground telling us where they were and that they were about a mile away from a funnel cloud that might tornado at any moment. Wall cloud was part of everyday vocabulary in the Spring. I miss that while I'm up here...it was something I got used to and actually liked when I lived in Oklahoma for five years after I lived in California.

[Ksyrup]

I was talking to my girlfriend last night and I said "You know, when I eventually move away, I'll almost miss this. Almost." There's just something about having your night interrupted by nature and then spending the whole night watching tv, trying to watch everyone tell you how you're all going to die (or how you're going to miss it).

I was talking to a friend of mine on ICQ last night who's out at Cal Tech for grad school but he grew up in Kansas and went to undergrad here and his quote after I told him what went on was "I hope we get at least one good thunderstorm while I'm back there. The perpetually bland weather around here gets boring after a while." We're crazy people, I tell ya.

SI
I know the feeling. I went through Hurricanes Hugo and Andrew and kinda miss the feeling of those nights. Obviously, I don't wish for the death and destruction they brought, but there was something "fun" about it, as well.

The only thing I miss about South Florida is the afternoon thunderstorms. We usually get rain nearly every afternoon during the summer here, but the full-blown thunderstorms are few and far between compared to the daily lightshow in South Florida.

[Craptacular]

Mother Nature is pissing me off. We got about 7 inches of rain over the weekend, which washed away days worth of landscaping work. I'm so sick of replacing dirt, gravel, etc.