Australian Severe Weather Forum

Just spotted this news item...

http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,25172357-2682,00.html


A TORNADO has whipped across the Eyre Peninsula and forecasters are warning severe thunderstorms and flash flooding are imminent in the state's south-east.

The town of Cummins, about 50km north of Port Lincoln, received a massive 37mm of rain between 3.30pm and 4.30pm this afternoon as a tornado passed through the region.

It is not known if any damage was reported.



There is no mention of a tornado on the current BoM Severe Storm Warning though they do mention the rainfall. Time to look for some other reports.

Some photos and an interview here:

http://blogs.abc.net.au/sa/2009/03/cummins-thunder.html

Looks like a landspout tornado maybe given the first shot shows more activity at the bottom.

<edit: just realised you can click on the photos for a higher res version>

Richary,

Photos courtesy of the ABC blog website article
http://blogs.abc.net.au/sa/2009/03/cummins-thunder.html





Nice landspout - and further there is a lowered base in the vicinity of the landspout tornado. This would have spun up along a boundary.

Regards,

Jimmy Deguara

Thanks Jimmy - the original heading "possible tornado" was taken on the basis of the original News Ltd article. Well they didn't say possible but I take anything I read there with a grain of salt until confirmed. Which is why I was glad I could find the photos and let more expert minds make a decision.

I did notice the base lowering, but also the sudden change of colour from cloud to dust. Still it would have been interesting to see in person. Hopefully if we are lucky some video will appear somewhere, have been checking youtube but nothing so far.

It is also worth noting there were no SES or other emergency service callouts to the area at the time apart from a possible fire started by a lightning strike, taken from this site http://www.sacfs.org/paging/ which monitors paging messages on the SA GRN. So any ground impact was either small or if it hit something didn't cause significant damage.

EDIT: I also don't understand some people - this guy saw what he believed was a tornado, now these things aren't that common in Australia - at least in the general public's minds. Even if I wasn't interested in storms I would still have driven that way to see the damage it might have caused and and see if anybody needed help. Putting on my uneducated hat - it's a tornado so it must have caused damage and could have killed people. Because that is what we see from the States. Tornado equals death and damage.

Edit JD: My clarification and changes is to ease any confusion and avoid any drift from the original topic - from a definitions perspective, a tornado is defined as a funnel cloud that makes contact from a cloud to the ground. The dynamics of the landspout tornado make them structurally different than the mesocyclonic tornado we typically associate with in the United States. My comments were not in any way made in response to the article itself or verification from the Bureau.

Any damage would be to farmland.... eg. fences, trees, etc... apart from the town itself the area is not very populated...



BOM called it a tornado in this warning:

Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology
South Australia Regional Office
TOP PRIORITY FOR IMMEDIATE BROADCAST

SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING
for FLASH FLOODING and DAMAGING WIND
For people in the Upper South East and Lower South East districts.

Issued at 5:42 pm Wednesday, 11 March 2009.

Severe thunderstorms are likely to produce very heavy rainfall and flash flooding in the warning area over the next several hours. There is also a risk of damaging wind gusts. Locations which may be affected include Mount Gambier, Naracoorte, Bordertown and Lucindale.

The thunderstorms over Lower Eyre Peninsula have weakened and the warning for this area is cancelled. A tornado was observed near Cummins and 37 mm of rain was recorded at Cummins Aerodrome between 3:30 pm and 4:30 pm today.

Thanks, missed the earlier warning. They had dropped it by the 6:30-ish one. Agreed farmland would be the most likely target and yes do know the area as I used to live in Adelaide and spent a few times over there. But if it had hit a house we might have seen a call out, should have made that more clear. I have seen some storm damage pages for Mt Gambier and Renmark area, though the BoM winds aren't showing that strong.


(A few years ago Karoonda near Murray Bridge got hit, the following day I also saw a damage trail near Naracoorte - about 100m wide and branches to about 20cm snapped off on a long path with all these council guys cleaning up on a back road. Just as well it hit there as we were camped at Naracoorte Caves about 15km away, could have been interesting in a tent!)

Some low quality mobile phone video has turned up here...

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/03/12/2514200.htm?section=australia

Sorry - bee in my bonnet time here - but landspout tornado just isn't the right term. It is a double 'determiner' like saying a willy willy tornado or waterspout tornado or more abstractly a automobile car or aeroplane jet. Macca wrote about landspout formation earlier - so perhaps 'non supercell' tornado if we are convinced it was non-supercellular.
http://www.australiasevereweather.com/forum/general-weather-all-topics-that-are-not-current-severe-weather-should-be-posted-here/non-supercellular-tornadoes/

It is a nice pic....

Dan, Strictly if we are being correct this would be termed a Landspout, which is defined to be a non-supercellular tornado that occurs over land. ( Note: My example in the prior sentence is intentional). Its really not important what the title of the thread is, though ideally it would simply be a landspout. I do believe there already exists a thread for the discussion of tornado terminology and thus perhaps we can ignore the rather minor transgression in this thread and discuss further there.

Have attached the aerological diagrams for Adelaide and Woomera which are both about the same distance from Cummins

Conditions at Woomera would be fairly representative of the storm environment further south through the Eyre Peninsula. There's some good turning evident. Would not surprise me if other storms had tornadoes that day too.

Adelaide

Woomera


---> 256km scale radar loop

---> 512km scale radar loop

I was on that storm system that came through the Lower South East around 6:00pm the first cell was a HP (high precipitation) with not much potential for lightning even though i got caught in the core of it when rain was dumped

The second cell was slightly weaker but did managed to produce a rumble of thunder and 1 quick flash of lightning which my handheld video camera somehow caught but despite the huge let down in amongst all of the hype of this storm being really bad i did get some pics

Before anyone asks why the photos are so small its because i resized them so they didnt take up too much page space on here

 

Hi all.  A very nice inclusion for comment this landspout is.  Some excellent storms and anyone who was on it would be pleased with the outcome!  A spectacular thing to see when it's so much in view.  The soundings are an added bonus, thanks MB.

Thanks guys. Jimmy, no offence was taken at the edits of the title etc. Better to correct it to reality as the new information comes to light. People searching news.com.au will get the tornado version. People searching here will get the real version.

Michael - thanks for the radar loops. Shows the intensity near Cummins was fairly short lived with only one frame with a black spot. Do you think that could have been the landspout or was it more likely just a heavy rain/hail dump?

Some different video has also turned up at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25174925-5006787,00.html

I just want to get this straight for my own understanding... (as yer I'm still confused even though this subject has come up b4)

So because this storm was not a supercell, we cannot call it a tornado as such?
How many 'tornados' in the USA or elsewhere are actually 'landspouts' but get reported as tornados? In the media or otherwise?

If this landspout hit the town of Cummins and destroyed 50 homes with a dozen lives lost, are we still going to have to call it a landspout?

Is the BOM calling it a tornado just so that the general public (and the media) doesnt ask the question, 'Whats the difference?' 

Edit: Who's comment were you refering Tim?

Interesting point Tim.
Notionally a Landspout is a subcategory of tornadoes, defined to describe a non-supercellular tornado that occurs over land, produced by conditions similar conditions noted for waterspouts. Thus because this was not a supercell, it would be a Landspout or land based non-supercellular tornado...no matter the damage.

As for reports im not sure, but id suspect it would happen in a few cases...generally though the damage from non-supercellular tornadoes is sub-F2 in the northern hemisphere, and Id assume somewhat lesser in the SH...the media in the US would probably call it a tornado despite the actual nomenclature as like for BOM it is done for simplicity...the australian media generally struggles with not adding the word mini-as a tornado prefix...how do you think theyd cope with landspout. Take for instance Clyve's Quasi Stationary Linear Convective Tornado.....simply put that was a tornado. I think its important to note here that these categorisations have been added as we understand more about the development of tornadoes, and thus will likely continue to adapt. For example Clyve's tornado doesnt actually fit into either the strict landspout or tornadic categories, and is a subtype of non-supercellular tornadoes (though it is actually far closer to a tornado than a landspout due to the production of a short lived mesocyclone). So really it doesnt matter what we call them as long as people understand the difference between a real tornado and a non-supercellular.

Rich, just regarding that short lived blackspot, i very much doubt that corresponded to the landspout, rather just the collapse of the updraft core. Generally landspouts occur with a strong updraft (usually aided by large lapse rates) meets a localised vorticity or helicity maximum...producing a short lived vortex (ie as long as these conditions are sustained). That echo probably reflects why this was a strong landspout: a large suspended water body suggests quite a strong updraft.

John