Kevin's chase....

Intern Kevin Smith went storm spotting during our severe weather outbreak Sunday evening. Here is a technical discussion he typed up....

I was on the storm that passed over Meck County around 8:30 and intercepted it in the Concord area when it blew up. Helicity was out the roof with shear readings around 100 knots! Looking at the skew-t I had the hodograph had nice curvature as well which again means very favorable shear for supercell genesis. The SWEAT index, which i was getting off RUC from model extractor, was showing SWEAT index of around 400 which is around severe to tornadic. MUCAPE was high enough to get some decent energy and CIN was low so it was easy to tap into the CAPE the was present at that time. Lifted Index was significantly negative I forgot what the exact number was but it was definitely in the severe range, must have had significant divergence aloft. If i remember correctly when the storm passed over

Concord at around 9 it had a pretty nice inflow notch associated with it. Bulk Richardson values were less than 45 which indicates supercell convection and it takes into account CAPE and Shear.

I'm not sure if the cell was under a right entrance or left exit region of a jet streak to maximize vertical motion for some reason i couldn't obtain a upper air map while i was quickly looking at all the ohter indices. These storms also seemed to have some good tilt to them thanks to great shear values which gave some of the cells a more defined FFD and RFD. I obtained all these values off model extractor and SPC along with accuweather pro. Hail was around quarter size, with windgust easily over 60 mph. Rainfall rates were around 4" an hour which is pretty incredible. Wish i could have made it up to High Point to catch that EF-3 but i wouldnt want to mess with that at night. Hopefully spring will bring us more days with interesting weather. We are the new tornado ally!

Kevin Smith
kbsmith@uncc.edu