Sunday, August 24, 2008

Lemon Gulch Landspout (Castle Rock, CO area)

Images courtesy of Timothy Tonge (Skyview Weather)





2 comments:

http://www.storytellersrus.com said...

Nice! I was in my basement but my brother in law took some shots of it. I have no idea how to read your velocity chart. I guess the red means spinning fast? haha I will have to forward your site to my husband who is a chaser wannabe.

Dann Cianca said...

Hi Barbara,
The best way to read the velocity chart is to think of it this way: The RADAR is in the top center marked by the KFTG. The RADAR sends out energy that is returned when it hits a target such as a rain drop. In this particular display, the green colors represent targets that are moving TOWARD the radar site. The reds represent targets moving away. In each case, the brighter the color, the more rapidly the target is moving toward or away from the RADAR. If you look at the end of the yellow arrow, you can see some very bright green right next to very bright red. This shows that we have targets moving swiftly toward the RADAR right next to targets moving swiftly away from the RADAR. This is a HUGE difference in speed and motion in a very small area and is indicative of a tight, spinning column of air. (moving counter clockwise). This is how meteorologists are able to say "RADAR indicates strong rotation in this storm". This was a very tight circulation and showed what was in this case a landspout tornado.

Hopefully that was easy to understand!

Thanks for stopping by.

Dann.