E28: Delmarva tornado outbreak recap

Chief Meteorologist Rich Wirdzek and Meteorologist Drew Wolf are back this week talking about last Thursday's tornado outbreak. 4 separate tornadoes touched down in northern Delmarva, including a high end EF-1 tornado that ripped through Dover. Rich and Drew recap the day's setup and the supercell that created the tornadoes, and discuss the the final surveys done by the National Weather Service. 

Transcript

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All right, man, what a busy week last week was. We ended up, we'll just get right into it here. Talk about the tornadoes and then we'll get into the forecast here moving forward as we get closer to September.

Also a little tropics check too, but you know, going back to last Thursday, wake up in the morning. I don't know how you were watching it evolve that day too, but you wake up in the morning, the SPC had its update, slight risk, it looked like we definitely were in line for a high wind event, maybe some hail, the lapse rates that day were like through the roof. But as the day went on, I noticed that there was just a constant chatter and update from the weather service and the SPC, they're recording back and forth on like, you know, some of this extra vorticity that was around.

But I remember this, the, what is it? The tornado, significant tornado parameter, the STP was starting to just like go off like five, six, anybody listening in the scale, that's pretty high, especially for us here in the mid Atlantic. And we look at bay breezes, ocean breezes here in Delmarva, I think that played a role when this line of storms eventually developed and moved through. But I noticed that as the day went on, then the SPC put a hatched area for the EF2 tornado potential, and I think they were pretty spot on with what happened.

I agree. I think it was definitely one of those scenarios, at least I think in my opinion, it was definitely like as more information and stuff kind of came in or kind of closer to the event itself that I think the SPC and folks there kind of really hammered it down and was like, oh, it was actually a bit more of a threat than originally forecasted and anticipated. So I think they did a pretty good job with that.

I think their hash mark, you said, was spot on. And it just panned out that that tornado threat and every other threat was just a bit more elevated than originally forecasted. And man, just what a busy day Thursday was.

I remember when they were chatting, too, about the weather service and the SPC after the hatched area came out, they were chatting on, you know, the watch was going to get issued and they were coordinating whether it was going to be a severe thunderstorm or tornado watch. And I think initially the push was to get a severe thunderstorm watch, isolated tornado. But they bumped that up at the last second.

All right. Actually, I think it came out as severe thunderstorm watch and then they had to upgrade it to a tornado watch. But it was great. 

It was a good move. Right. You know, the storm that eventually produced the tornadoes here in Delmarva, which by the way, have ended up as four now total.

We had Barkley, Merrydale just on the Kent County side of Merrydale in Delaware, Hazletville, a little town just outside of Dover, and then Dover itself. That was a high precip, like mega supercell embedded with a line. You know, it almost it was almost kind of like an MCS that was moving across Delmarva that was at the top of it.

And we see what these HP supercells, as we call them, rain wrapped. You can't see the tornado. We saw that in the video in Dover where the rain was coming in.

All of a sudden the roof of the hotel just basically explodes. Yeah. But that that set up that day, we saw similar cells, super embedded supercells within a line up near from where you're from.

Right. Lancaster, York area. Yeah. 

Southern New Jersey as well. Yes. Yeah.

So, yeah, the two tornadoes that touched down back home. So Columbia, Lancaster County and Eastern York County damaged from Eastern York School District with the F1 tornado or F2 tornado, I think it was in York County. Just absolutely just devastating images coming out of images from back home.

That school district in particular actually pushed their official first day of school to think a couple of days after or started the year remotely because of how how much damage the tornado caused for their school district. And and the videos from Columbia, which is about like 35 minutes away from my hometown. So that's definitely puts a bit of perspective that I mean, we're still at the time of year that tornadoes can happen any time, any place, even besides the outside of so-called Tornado Alley that we all know and love or really not know and love, but just all know about it.

We love if you're a chaser. If you're a chaser, I love it. If you're a weather enthusiast, you follow it, but you don't obviously love the damage of the impacts and the things that those those things can cause, which we've known all too well so far this summer because the four this month and then the three last month, we got the seven total here in Delmarva, which is absolutely mind boggling because never would have thought that my first two, three months here, I would say, oh, I'm sitting here.

Oh, we have seven tornadoes in like two months time total. It's it's showing you the mid-Atlantic's kind of got its own little little own version of Tornado Alley kind of setting up for us. I've noticed that over the years.

That's certainly been an increasing thing. And it's, you know, this time of the year, it used to be just tropical induced tornadoes like we had Isaias back in 2020, which is actually what we're comparing to this little mini outbreak to from Delaware standpoint with a number of tornadoes. But that was tropical storm induced.

But now we're seeing that it's not just spring where we can get tornadoes here in the mid-Atlantic. It's like once the season starts, it just keeps going. You know, we had three last month.

We had the four. And I'm just talking about here regionally, just for us, Delmarva. Yep.

August, a strong tornado for us. High end EF1 is pretty strong. You know, and then you get in the fall and there's usually kind of a secondary like peak of severe weather slash tornado occurrences in the Midwest and the mid-Atlantic.

And, but I think for us now, it's like the season, once it starts in the spring, it just doesn't end until the fall. Wow. Like, yeah, and kind of coincides with our peak high wind event part of the season, the straight line damaging winds that we see around here.

It's usually in the bulk of the summer months, you know, that we have that. So interesting to see how that's kind of turning out. And by the way, the four tornadoes, they're separate tornadoes that touched down, you know, the first in Barkley, Maryland, they were real brief.

That was an EF1. The Marydale one was, I believe EF1 as well. Haslottville was interesting.

I got a video from a couple of folks. They have a farm that they took their drone up and they could show like the crop scarring. And I think I sent you some of those pictures there.

And you could see that their barn got hit as well. And the weather service added that as another separate tornado path, EF0. And then we know the strongest one of the day ended up being Dover, which was a high-end EF1 and took out that little league complex that they have, or at least caused extensive damage.

It's going to be a while before they clean that up. You know, a lot of chatter online, they thought it should have been rated higher. And, you know, the weather services use very detailed engineering, structural engineering science to recreate what type of wind speed would have created the damage.

And 100 to 110 mile per hour winds, it will cause that damage that you saw. And it's typically just roof damage. Some buildings will lose a wall like that, the Kraft plant.

Once you get a roof to peel, that wind, a cinderblock wall is going to fail. That's going to happen. A lot of people thought it should have been a higher rating as a result of that.

But I think the weather service, those guys at Mount Holly, guys and gals at Mount Holly did a really good job with the surveys down here. There was a lot of work for them over the weekend. I know a lot of them worked well into the weekend to get these surveys done.

You can find all that, by the way. We have them up on our website, WMDT.com. The four storm surveys from the Delmarva tornadoes from last Thursday. So if you want to check that out a little more and get a better idea on track, we have maps on there and everything like that, too.

So kind of pivoting here, now that we've had this major severe weather event a couple days in the past, I don't think anybody could complain about the weather here to start the week. I agree. I mean, I'm definitely not complaining because if you remember from my debut episode, which only, by the way, it's only my second episode that I've done this podcast.

So it's been a while. That's right. But remember what I said, love those days where it's just mostly sunny, low humidity, temperatures, 70s, 80s.

Take it. And this is what we've been. We've had a treat like this for a little while.

And we do it today. Filming this on Tuesday. We do it again for our day on Wednesday.

A little bit of uptick in humidity, though. A little bit Wednesday. But then come our Thursday, where we start introducing some showers, possibly even some storms with another system.

And by Friday, I think we do the same thing. And we'll see about how the weekend plays out this weekend. Yeah.

The dynamics don't look like they're going to be there. Yeah. But they didn't look like last time they were going to be there either.

Yeah. Especially we get some early convection Thursday and even Friday, the way anything times out. We get rain that's in the morning.

That'll help to cap things off a little bit for us as far as keeping the air a little extra stabilized. That's kind of what was the premise of what I was talking about yesterday during my forecast. So it remains to be seen if that works out that way.

Tropics still quiet. I guess the last thing to talk about is there were a couple systems out there in the Atlantic. They look like they're kind of like a coin flip, whether we're going to develop or not.

Yeah. But I know the westerlies, a lot of the shear that's over close to the land here, it looks like that would just chew them up and push them out to sea anyway. Yeah.

The one that emerged, the tropical wave emerging from Africa is now, I think, in the red. I think it's got a 70% chance of development now. But so the one that's like Nova Scotia or the other one that's kind of out to sea anyway, it's like 40% or 50% of development next two, I think that's a seven day one.

But the one off Africa, I think, was what the National Hurricane Center has their eyes on and what they're monitoring the most on. See if we get Dali, right? That's right. That's the next named storm.

Yeah. Dali. And we haven't had the first hurricane yet.

No, we haven't. No, we haven't. It's all been tropical systems.

Yeah. We knew it with El Nino coming in and there were some other factors at play, too. But now that we're getting into late August, September, there's going to be more activity.

And that one you're talking about there, the one coming off the coast of Africa, that's more of a classic track anyway for this time of year. Yep. So yeah, we'll see as we record this on a Tuesday, post on a Wednesday.

So I'm sure we're going to have a lot more to talk about with the tropics for our next edition of WeatherWise. But I think that's good to wrap it up again. Check out those tornado surveys from the National Weather Service we have at WMDT.com. And if you want to get more information on that.

But we'll keep an eye on the tropics, of course, and probably have a little more to talk about next Wednesday for another edition here of WeatherWise. But for myself, Chief Meteorologist Rich Wirdzek, and this week with meteorologist Drew Wilk, another edition of WeatherWise. Thanks for downloading, streaming, listening.

And we'll talk to you again next Wednesday.