New research is revealing the secrets of these destructive twisters, which dodge radar scans and often form at night.
Meteorologist Thea Sandmael watched the storm close in. It was near enough for her to spot a rotating dome of clouds emerging from its dark underbelly — the quickening of a tornado. By the time the spinning mass was 10 minutes away, Sandmael and her colleagues had shut down their radar instruments and evacuated their post.
Their work has already revealed that squall line tornadoes may be more common and more dangerous than previously thought. Fortunately, the researchers may have also discovered clues that could help make these twisters a little less surprising. For instance, in March 2022, PERiLS researchers measured CAPE of only about 500 joules per kilogram in a squall line over Mississippi and Alabama that produced dozens of tornadoes. And Lyza says he’s seen squall line tornadoes supported by CAPE values as low as 100 joules per kilogram. These low CAPE settings exemplify environments that have been understudied in terms of their capacity to form squall line twisters, Anderson-Frey says.
On March 30, 2022, a squall line tornado tore through a farmstead in Mississippi, uprooting and destroying this machine shed, which had been anchored to the ground by concrete pillars.“A good chunk of the roof decking was blown off, and an entire exterior wall was blown out of the house,” Lyza says. Nearby rested the remains of a machine shed that had been uprooted and ripped apart. The shed had been anchored to the ground by 5-foot-long concrete pillars, Lyza recalls.
Fortunately, a mobile radar vehicle had been deployed just four kilometers to the south. Its beams had captured the enigmatic twister’s odd dance, along with evidence that its strange path had been shaped by multiple vortices: tornadoes in a tornado. These subvortices “probably increase the maximum intensity of the tornado,” says wind engineer Frank Lombardo of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who assessed the damage at the site with Lyza. The wind speeds in a subvortex may compound with the wind speeds of the parent tornado, he explains.
Some squall lines will bow out as they advance and form “bow echoes,” as shown in this photo take in South Dakota in 2016. Bow echoes are often associated with squall line tornadoes.We can predict squall lines well — generally with more accuracy than we can predict other types of thunderstorms, says atmospheric scientist Patrick Skinner of CIWRO. But forecasting the embedded mesovortices is very difficult, he says.
Using data collected during PERiLS, along with 10 years’ worth of radar data gathered by the National Weather Service, Murphy and his colleagues investigated how the atmosphere changed ahead of mesovortices in squall lines. More specifically, they analyzed wind velocities at different levels of the atmosphere ahead of mesovortices that formed tornadoes and those that did not.
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