May 17, 2019 • Southwest Kansas Tornadoes {David}

Texas Storm Chasers's David Reimer headed out to the Oklahoma Panhandle on a conditional risk for significant severe weather. A strong cap was expected to prevent thunderstorm development, but if a storm did get going, it would likely be a tornado-producing machine. Such a storm did indeed develop around 7 PM near Beaver, Oklahoma. Within 30 minutes of developing that storm was producing its first tornado. It would go on to produce multiple long-lived tornadoes over the coming hours and late into the night.

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0:00 Intro Sequence
0:12 Tornado touches down near Forgan, Oklahoma in the OK Panhandle
0:58 Tornado reaches strongest point in life cycle
1:39 Zoomed in shot of damaging tornado and debris cloud
3:00 Tornado roping out near Forgan, OK
3:16 Later, new tornado near Fowler, Kansas with dusty debris cloud
3:52 Funnel cloud with dust swirl, funnel attempts to drop
4:40 Tall dust cloud in base of tornado near Fowler
5:50 Strong dusty debris kick-up to left of roadway
6:23 Fully developed tornado and unfortunately rolled semi

[MsCathy]

Good camera work. Thank you for sharing.

[cpmffeilberg]

I was on live comments on Fox with ABC13HOUSTON during that one. Scary and I'm cosy in Ontario Canada watching. Kudos to the chasers and I hope no injuries or fatalities.

[Birdbike]

what a beautiful storm at beginning of video. Amazing footage of not so typical tornados.

[NickyDeePee]

So I'm relatively new to all this - I wanted to chase tornadoes back when I was 5 and 'Twister' came out (anyone else lol?), but have always lived up and down the East Coast and in Europe. The obsession slowly dissipated over the years until recently, in my late 20s, and I'd love to start taking vacations out to the Midwest to chase a few tornadoes! What's the learning curve for chasing? What does it take to reach an adequate level of knowledge? Do you start by keeping a good, safe distance and creeping closer as you learn their behavior (by observation, computer, and any other tool)?

You can definitely just tell that drillbitting is a sign of higher intensity, but why does the drillbitting (and thereby intensity) seem to correlate poorly with the size of the tornado? You have El Reno and other biiiig big papas scoring EF3, and much narrower tornadoes with that signature drilling scoring EF5. I recently saw a Pecos Hank video about quantum computers simulating super cell formation and tornadogenesis. The lead researcher suggested that their models contradicted quite a lot of our previous theories about tornadogenesis.


That said, what is the currently accepted theory of what makes a tornado powerful, if not size? Or is there a point where increasing size negatively affects ground wind speed? Like too much drag or something? Because I'm pretty sure the El Reno tornado covered enough area (trees, property, cars, etc.) to hit EF5 if its ground speed were high enough, but the wind speeds up inside the tornado were record setting.