A "career" storm… from a radar operator standpoint. It’s 3:00am, I’m still up, but should be going to bed, but I’m just too darned keyed up. Where do I begin? The storm of the day erupted at the southernmost end of a cluster of pseudo-organized right and left members to its immediate north. But the far southern storm that erupted out of nowhere just had that shape. Not 2 minutes after I issued SVR again for eastern Clark Co for that storm I issued TOR… I didn’t have to wait for strong 0.5 convergence/couplet, whatever. It took it awhile to get going… about Protection or so… but when it did… it went on to produce a fantastic velocity signature 0.5/0.9 slices north of Protection. The couplet was tracking more northeast… missing Coldwater to the northwest and approaching highway 183 about 7 SSW of Greensburg. Velocity rotational couplets were topping out at around 150 knots total shear over about a 1-2 mile radius. I was just thanking the lord that it appeared to be taking a course to miss Greensburg to the southeast. The next couple slices, though, frightened me. The damn couplet was bending to the left…and the next scan was even more to the left… and I didn’t even really give it thought… the "…tornado emergency for Greensburg…" in my next SVS… it was like instinct – just did it. Those few minutes after watching one of the most incredible velocity couplets go directly over one of your good sized communities in your CWA… I was just too anxious. Then the message was sent out… a plea from Greensburg dispatch… "Ford County communications this is Greensburg… we just took a direct hit…".. that came no more than about 3 or 4 minutes after the couplet passed over. I then immediately sent out another SVS indicating that Greensburg likely took a direct hit.

Thereafter… the steady-state cycling of tornado cyclone…tornado…left turn…. next cycle… tornado, left (north) turn…. next cycle… it was routine… the most steady-state cyclic significant tornadic supercell I had ever seen, let alone work the warnings on radar. I don’t think that there was 1 minute from the time of the first tornado near Protection….to the time it exited our CWA and headed into the Ellinwood area…that there wasn’t a significant tornado tearing $h1t up….over that 100 mile stretch. 100 miles of steady-state tornado production… I’m not sure how many members there were in this wedge-family. Just to see hours on end of velocity signatures like this is something I’ll never forget. Inbounds of 120 knots and higher at times… inbounds only! Several times throughout the life! I think the highest we saw was about 150 knots that actually looked like legit data… as in properly aliased.

Greensburg is pretty much gone. Especially the western 1/2 of town from what I can surmise from the media reports and interviews. How many of you are familiar with the Largest Hand-dug Well? There’s a tall tower that stands proud above that well. No more. Completely gone, at least from one of the accounts I heard. The Big Well is located in the heart of town… and the reports are that downtown and the western portions of town suffered the worst of the damage. One account I heard of was that when one of the residents looked out their window… they couldn’t see the tower anymore. They didn’t know where it went.

One of my favorite storm photos of the year so far included Greensburg in the shot. This was taken about 5 miles west of Greensburg back on March 29th.

So it’s 3am, and at the surface here in DDC it is 72/65F with the short-fuse composite showing 3000 J/kg of CAPE… at 08z! Winds are howling out of the south southeast… it’s going to be another long day today…

Mike U