March 12, 2006 Tornadoes

Meteorologist Ted Keller posted this in Storm Summaries on March 12th, 2010

Looking NNE from Seymour on 3/12/06. From video shot by Matt Gingery.

In terms of shear numbers and intensity, this outbreak was much worse than the May 4th, 2003 outbreak.

16 different tornadoes tracked through the area indicated on the maps below. This total does not count the rest of Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Illinois.

Tornado Tracks

Radar at 9:31 pm 3/12/06

Doppler Radar: it can sense whether raindrops or hail are moving away or toward the radar site. This principle also works in an environment without storms because radar beams can actually bounce off of large cloud droplets and turbulent pockets in the atmosphere. Doppler codes winds that are blowing toward the radar with green, wind blowing away as red.

The first image captured at about 6:00 pm shows winds near the surface of the earth coming from the SSW. Two hours later at 8:00 pm, the winds had turned slightly or backed to the SSE.

This turning of the wind in the lowest layer of the atmosphere has been shown to have a profound impact on the potential for thunderstorms to produce tornadoes.

This can also be seen in the Conway profiler data. Note not only the backing winds but also the incredible overall wind speeds which increased rapidly with height. This kind of wind profile helps to give supercell thunderstorms longevity.

Doppler at 6 pm

Doppler at 8 pm Conway, MO Profiler on 3/12/06

Conway, MO Profiler on 3/12/06

Eerie Similarity: The map below is actually two maps superimposed: one shows the track (heavy red line) of the May 4th, 2003 tornado while the other shows the track (thin red line) of the March 12th, 2006 tornado. The tracks are exactly on top of each other near Verona and never drift more than a mile from each other until the very end. The 2003 storm turned left near the end of its track and struck Battlefield while the 2006 storm maintained more of a straight line. These maps were created by the Springfield National Weather Service Office and can be found in their original form here (2003) and here (2006).