Lancaster County Tornado

Lancaster County Tornado

Introduction:

Not all tornadoes come from well defined supercell thunderstorms. Worse, the limitations of radar range pose a serious scientific problem when attempting to forecast and warn on small scale and spin-up tornadoes. It appears, a small tornado spun-up in a weak thunderstorm during the evening hours of 18 June 2000. The KCCX WSR-88D viewed the storm from too high an elevation slice to properly diangose this storm. Preliminary data suggest there was upto 40 kts of outbound velocity in the storm at 12 kft AGL. Little useful data was contained in the the storm relative velocity or reflectivity products

Composite reflectivity data

2325 UTC | 2330 UTC | 2335 UTC | 2340 UTC | 2345 UTC | 2350 UTC |

Storm relative Velocity data

2325 UTC | 2330 UTC | 2335 UTC | 2340 UTC | 2345 UTC | 2350 UTC |

Velocity data

2325 UTC | 2330 UTC | 2335 UTC | 2340 UTC | 2345 UTC | 2350 UTC |

Conclusion:

This was an unwarned for, weak tornado that was observed in a storm too far from the radar to be properly detected and warned for. This case demonstrates that there are distinct limits of predicitibility.