Severe Storm Update

[00:00:00]Hey guys, good evening. 7:48 here on this Monday night. Yeah, things are changing a little bit. Hey, I'm chief meteorologist Tom Wash. Really want to get you in here, show you what's going on because we have several tornado warnings up to the north, but it may not be as it seems. Let's take a look. First of all, several tornado warnings in effect right now up to our north. Now, you can see me show Milwaukee here just so you can kind of get an idea where Milwaukee is on the map. So, this is well off to the north and there are several tornado warnings that are in effect right now and this is for what we call land spouts here.

[00:00:41]Several tornado warnings and it goes up towards the Wausau area and up to the northeast as well. So, let's take a look and show you here. These are not overly strong cells at this point. What I'll do is I'll put the warnings on and you can see they're relatively weak cells. Especially this one. Look at the one northwest of Toma here. Nothing overly strong. So, what's going on? Imagine a waterspout, but over land.

[00:01:10]That's what's happening here. In other words, the air is stretching very, very quickly and just like a figure skater that brings their arms in, spins faster, right? That's what we're seeing here.

[00:01:22]So, these are not overly strong thunderstorms, but they are strong enough to produce these land spouts, which effectively are weak tornadoes that can produce generally EF0 damage.

[00:01:35]There may have even been some damage out of these. Now, we'll get into this here in a second, but what you'll notice here is the cells are moving pretty slowly to the southeast. Again, live here on social media with several tornado warnings.

[00:01:51]Uh this one, this is a law enforcement confirmed tornado 10 mi northeast of Marshfield near Mosinee within the next 20 minutes actually and it is moving east at 20 miles per hour. So these are moving very slowly. These are not supercellular type tornadoes and that's a really important point that I want to make here is that and I just heard Chris thank you for this on Facebook.

[00:02:18]A family in Rib Mountain and Wausau hearing the sirens going off. Yes, people under these warnings should be in their tornado safe spot right now because there are tornado warnings out of this but to kind of put your mind at ease a little bit, these are not the types of tornado warnings that we've had with the system up here in the UP of Michigan and into Door County. Okay, if that makes sense there and that's where they're still seeing severe weather as that's heading out over the lake. Two very different scenarios here. So again, this is more of the supercellular type activity. These are small little cells really struggling to get their act together but tapping into quite a bit of wind shear and the stretching that I talked about that is causing these landspouts. So again, these are like waterspouts over land enough to do some damage but these are not going to be EF2 EF3 rated tornadoes and in fact let's look here if you're just joining me again live on social media and this is for tornado warnings that we have ongoing up to the north including and let me just verify here that's including this area by Black River Falls right around I-94 up there and this is it's a very weak storm. I mean barely any lightning with it. Now let's see if we can I mean you can pick up a little bit of strong you just a very little rotation by Black River Falls but you see what I mean? Just enough there to produce a landspout tornado just to the southwest of Black River Falls. I'll be honest with you, this is very different of a night than we were expecting. Uh we were expecting a big line of thunderstorms. That has not happened, which is good news, but here again, you could see this might be getting its act together a little bit over by Fremont. That one is not tornado warned. Now we go up towards Wausau and Menominee. Now again, the radar here is not great, so you're going to it's doesn't look quite as good over Wausau because of the radar beam. But again, look up here. That's why they warned this puppy. See what I mean?

[00:04:26]So this is up by Mattoon and heading towards Menominee. These are very tiny little areas of rotation, but just enough to produce some weak tornadoes known as landspouts. So again, if you're just joining me here, and I'm going to check the chat from time to time as well.

[00:04:44]Um if you're just joining me, um there are tornado warnings uh that are in place up to the north. There are several of them. Looks like a new one was just issued here. Let's take a look.

[00:04:56]So that's going to be up in Marinette County, and that is for radar indicated rotation up there. So again, they're continuing. There's a lot of wind shear with this. Now this one actually interesting. This one up in Marinette County I think is a little different. Look at the lightning here.

[00:05:14]Now let's switch to the radar. I think this one's a bit different. This is not landspout-ish. This could be more supercellular, which could be indicative of a stronger tornado potentially um up in far northeastern Wisconsin.

[00:05:27]Now, what's going to be interesting here, look at how these storms are starting to strengthen. And that's what I'm wondering here is if we go from these kind of landspouts to more juicier type rotation.

[00:05:44]That's going to be interesting, and in part because as these storms are slowly moving to the southeast, they're going to be getting more into a better environment as it heads towards Stevens Point. But do you see what I mean here? Let me go back. Again, tornado warnings in effect for central Wisconsin and northeastern Wisconsin, but look at the difference here between this cell, okay, that just went under that tornado warning. You can almost see a little hook right there, too.

[00:06:13]versus these cells.

[00:06:15]These cells are much weaker. They are smaller. This is tapping into more rotation, but these are effectively what stronger waterspouts, all right?

[00:06:24]And then this one is very different that appears to be more supercellular, kind of like what we were expecting across the entire area, to be honest. Now, while I've got you on here, stay tuned.

[00:06:34]I'm going to dial into the National Weather Service.

[00:06:40]Try to get some updates for you.

[00:06:47]All right, this was 10 minutes ago out of the National Weather Service in Green Bay. Scattered showers, still no lightning to speak of, showing strong low-level rotation across Marathon and southern Langlade counties. There's extremely strong low-level shear, that is strong turning of the winds, plus a lot of very unstable air close to the ground, so it won't take much to get a funnel cloud or a brief tornado. So, again, they're kind of confirming what we're seeing on radar. Now, the Black River Falls, oh, this is concerning.

[00:07:22]Interesting here.

[00:07:24]The rotation is weakening in Black River Falls, but they picked up the Weather Service in La Crosse on a tornado debris signature.

[00:07:32]Let's take a look at this here. Um And that cell was just weak around Black River Falls, but let's take a look at that real quick. See if we can pick that up here.

[00:07:48]Let's see.

[00:07:50]I mean, maybe a little bit in here. So, what we're looking at, this is called correlation coefficient on the radar. We call it the debris tracker.

[00:07:58]And if something gets lofted in the air, it you'll see kind of a color change here because it's showing the rain out of this, but then you might get a quick color change. It does look like him.

[00:08:11]This was just very brief. That looks to me like it's falling apart. But again, just from what I'm seeing on the radar, that's what we're dealing with in the northern part of the state. The one in Marinette County really appears to be juicy to me right now.

[00:08:25]Um But again, that's going to stay away from us.

[00:08:29]Now, farther to the southwest, I it's going to be interesting to see how these storms evolve. And I'll tell you, here we are just about 8:00. In fact, I've got to go and jump on our Fox local uh streaming app, but uh we'll see if any of these continue to evolve. Right now, I'm not overly concerned for southeastern Wisconsin. Is it possible that we get in on some stronger storms?

[00:08:53]Yes, but as of the moment, I am not overly concerned. I think it's going to be very late tonight if these storms even hold together. So, stay tuned, but again, right now in Wausau, um that's more land spoutish. Marinette County is more the Marinette area is more supercellular to me. We're quiet in southeastern Wisconsin.