April 14th 2006 Case study.

I am not going to go into detail but I will make a case to help prove that these cells were in fact tornadic. Damage was documented and there were eye witness reports to validate the possibility of tornaodoes. I am however going to focus on the reports that the Indiana state police gave that night.

Below are the reports for the day and you can see the tornado reports in red. These were at first reported as tornadoes then wind damage, then later turned back into tornadoes. It can get confusing!

Tornado reports below!

Tornado Reports (in CSV format)
Time Location County State Lat Lon Comments
2245 MODESTO STANISLAUS CA 3766 12099 EYEWITNESSES DESCRIBED DEBRIS CLOUD ABOUT 200 FEET WIDE IN LAUDING WAY. BROKEN ROOF TILES...SMALL TREES SNAPPED IN HALF...WATER SUCKED OUT FROM SWIMMING POOL. (STO)
2357 AMBIA BENTON IN 4049 8752 (LOT)
0002 BATTLE GROUND TIPPECANOE IN 4051 8684 TORNADO REPORTED NEAR BATTLE GROUND (IND)
0100 4 W CRAWFORDSVILLE MONTGOMERY IN 4004 8697 STATE POLICE RPT TORNADO (IND)
0120 NEW ROSS MONTGOMERY IN 3996 8671 TORNADO RPTD AT NEW ROSS IN MONTGOMERY COUNTY (IND)

Below is a radar grab of the monsterous HP storm that produced the reports. You can see an eye there of a very high reflectivity. Sometimes these eyes can be debris being picked up by the tornado on radar.

Velocity image, red is wind blowing away from the radar and green is toward the radar. The radar is located in Indianapolis to the southeast of the image. You can see where red and green are right next to each other signifying rotation! Pretty big area there!

I have circled the area of rotation. This is right around the time in question. The first Crawfordsville report (look above). I have put a black dot were the officer might have been, thats right around were 400 west is. He would have been looking east at the tornado probably every time the lightning flashed.

If you look at the reports above the last one that is, I have put the corresponding image below. you can see that the rotating portion of the storm is right where the reports say it should be!

The twins! Both are supercells, and both probably produced at least brief tornadoes. The one on the left however is a HP supercell. And probably made the most trouble.

Not hard to see that the damage was most likely caused by a tornado. Very aggressive storms, persistant rotation at the time of these images.