Author Topic: Can tornadoes be seen on radar?  (Read 5391 times)

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striker92

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Can tornadoes be seen on radar?
« on: 02 March 2007, 11:36:07 AM »
Hey guys
I was just wondering, what do tornado's show up as on radar images?
Surely if the pick up debris and dust they would be captured on radar images.Are the radar images to low res or would the high res Brisbane and Adelaide radars be able to show a disturbance?
your thoughts please.

Cheers Mark

Offline Mike

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Can tornadoes be seen on radar?
« Reply #1 on: 02 March 2007, 04:06:08 PM »
Hi Striker02, I'll take a stab at an answer and others can correct me if I'm wrong on any points.  What you see on a radar for a supercell with a possible tornado is what's called a 'hook echo'  or 'bow echo'.  what that shows is that the system has rotation on a big scale.

Radar does not actually 'pick up' or 'detect' debris or dust and does not 'see' rain as such (although if there is so much debris it will), but rather the amount of precipitation within and around the system.  The darker the colours the heavier the precipitation - for example white to grey light, yellow medium then orange, red, black for heavy precipitation.  Even outflow bands of rain can be picked up on the radar image as faint lines of half circles or full circles in front of the actual storm echo - that sometimes shows in which direction the storm is heading.

Somebody may be able to post a radar image of a hood echo but as far as i know the vacant area within the visible 'hook' is the updraft section of the storm with the tornado usually forming on the rh or lh side of that.  The radar won't show a 'tornado' as such as they're things that are created by the host storm itself and not the other way round, but it can show 'where' the tornado is most likely to be formed with images bounced back to the radar from within the system.

Hope that helps.  I think i'm sort of right without all the technical stuff, but you'll get more technical answers no doubt long after this!

Mike
Darwin, Northern Territory.
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striker92

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Can tornadoes be seen on radar?
« Reply #2 on: 02 March 2007, 05:38:52 PM »
Thanks for that guys.
The reason i asked was one day when i saw what was a very suspicious lowering from a huge multi stepped and insanely fast rotating cloud base, the base was very low and when i got home i was straight on the beareau after around 10 minutes after i had seen the lowering, on the radar i saw wat was a pronounced middle circle with a dark hook on one side and on the other a large throw out arm with quite a mean curve, the best way to describe it would be a spiral galaxy missing two arms and having 1 cut in half

Offline Michael Bath

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Can tornadoes be seen on radar?
« Reply #3 on: 03 March 2007, 04:55:03 AM »
Mark - if you know the dates/times of specific events, I can look up my radar archive collection and see what they show.

Have split this subject off the QLD tornado warning thread.

regards, Michael
Location: Mcleans Ridges, NSW Northern Rivers
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Offline Mike

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Re: Can tornadoes be seen on radar?
« Reply #4 on: 03 March 2007, 07:08:50 AM »
Thanks John, I was sort of on the money, although some loose change was falling to the pavement....thanks for the more meteoroligical terminology.  Mental note to self.....make sense...!

Mike :)
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Offline Mike

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Re: Can tornadoes be seen on radar?
« Reply #5 on: 04 March 2007, 12:17:06 PM »
Mark, here's some radar images of supercells with tornadoes that claimed 7 lives in the US this week in Enterprise Alabama.

Mike
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VORTEX

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Re: Can tornadoes be seen on radar?
« Reply #6 on: 05 March 2007, 12:55:30 AM »
Doppler radar can indicate movement of air in toward the radar and away from the radar...The left radar image is the velocity product showing not only the strong rotational cuplet but a pronounced hail shaft near Colony Kansas...The right image is a WSR-88D image of the tornadic rotation that killed a little girl in South Missouri...This was at a time when the ground truth observation by the survey team rated the tornado EF3...This indicates a gate to gate shear of 122Kts (the storm was Northeast of Mt Home and WSW of West Plains)....The mode shown is Storm Relative Velocity which indicated the actual wind fields inbound and outbound referenced to the radar site....Click to enlarge..Jim 
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« Last Edit: 05 March 2007, 01:07:26 AM by VORTEX »

Michael Thomas

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Re: Can tornadoes be seen on radar?
« Reply #7 on: 05 March 2007, 06:42:18 AM »
I remembered reading about debris from tornadoes being detected by radar and found this.

http://www.spc.noaa.gov/coolimg/del_rio/index.html

In particular "The round "ball" of reflectivity in the hook is a rare feature, sometimes seen when a radar picks up tornado debris being lofted into a thunderstorm. [Tornado debris was the cause of a similar signature on May 3, 1999 in Oklahoma.]" If it is a rare radar feature in the US it probably has never been observed in Australia.

Michael

striker92

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Re: Can tornadoes be seen on radar?
« Reply #8 on: 07 March 2007, 01:59:38 PM »
Thanks guys
I guess that they can be seen, you just have to know what you are looking for. Still it seems it would take quite a powerfull tornado to lift the debris high enough to be detected by radar. Imagine the shock you would get to have been watching the 6 o clock news with a feature on an F5 tornado some 50 ks away to have half a Barn make itself a new feature in your backyard....

VORTEX

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Re: Can tornadoes be seen on radar?
« Reply #9 on: 08 March 2007, 10:55:51 AM »
Mike..You have to think of debris the same way that you would hail...A strong updraft can suspend softball size pieces of ice several thousand meters above mean terrain for a long time...Insulation, lumber, papers, metal siding, vegetation and the like are generally lighter and equally reflective to radar...With radar a .5 degree angle of inclination produces an altitude of about 300 meters at 25 Kilometers...An easy reach for tons and tons of debris...Look at a search engine and review the Pampa Texas tornado video...Full size cars and trucks were lifted hundreds of feet and thrown out of the updraft like they were thrown off of a merry-go-round...Here is a WSR-88D image of the Moore Oklahoma Tornado...This is a 65 DBZ debris ball reflectivity on a storm that was 10 Nautical miles from the radar site...The .5 degree altitude of the radar at the reflectivity was <200 meters

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« Last Edit: 08 March 2007, 11:09:07 AM by VORTEX »