June 13th, 2001
This night will long be remembered by me as the first significant severe weather event I worked. I was working the evening shift on this Wednesday evening. As I came in that late afternoon and we began to analyze data...it did not appear like a significant severe weather event was in the offing. Although there was certainly enough energy in the atmosphere...it appeared that the hogographs were fairly linear as well as the forcing. Thus it was commented on that we would likely issued numerous severe thunderstorm warnings...but little in the way of tornadic activity would occur. Well that cap held well into the late afternoon...and around 6pm a fellow forecaster and I went outside to see if we could see any cu popping up. Well we didn't really see all that much...but the atmosphere...at least in the past...has responded well to this forecaster becoming angry and shouting at the atmosphere to do something. Well that seemed to be all it took because we didn't stand there long and by the time that we had walked back inside there were already elevated cores showing up on the radar.
Well to make a long story short...the surface were able to back ahead of a strong short wave moving out of the central rockies and we ended up have several tornadoes...including the Seward, Nebraska F-4. As you can see from the SPC graphic from above (45 tornaodes!!!) there also several other significant tornadoes this evening...including the Narka, KS tornado. I ended up working about 15 hours during this event...and having fun the whole time. We didn't have anyone hurt or killed due to the excellent warnings that were issued by the 3 warning forecasters that night.
Here are some really great links with pictures and new articles of the event. I will be taking a trip to Omaha in the next month or so and hope to stop by the office and get a couple of radar pictures to put on here as well.
http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/nebraska/june13-2001radar2.html
http://www.rambocam.com/tornadoseward.html
http://www.tempesttours.com/seward_tornado_chase.html
http://nebraskaweather.unl.edu/severe/reports/2001/010613torphotos.htm
http://www.alltel.net/~sp11603/stormchasing/accounts/2001/061301d.html
