AccuWeather's Tony Laubach reported live from Nebraska on the evening of April 17 as rotating supercells led to landspouts and huge clouds of dust.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Tonight, he is live in eastern Nebraska as another stretch of storm chasing days begins.
00:06So, Tony, I know we've got some rotation here with this tornado-worn cell.
00:09How's it going out there?
00:13Well, Jeff, it's a dusty mess.
00:16In fact, I would say that we're probably on a potentially dangerous storm.
00:20I'm hoping to give you guys a view here shortly.
00:22I've kind of got my tail pointed toward the storm as I'm trying to get out ahead of it a little bit here.
00:27We're going to go right to some video here we've queued up here.
00:30These likely were land spout tornadoes.
00:33We actually had a couple of these develop just outside of Rogers, Nebraska.
00:37This was shortly before the storm picked up the tornado warning.
00:39Likely because of these, some cloud-based rotation was extremely evident with these.
00:45It didn't look like it was visually connected, but we certainly had at least two of these potential land spout tornadoes.
00:51You're looking probably at a wide shot from the dash cam that we were rolling on.
00:56But we certainly had at least, like I said, one or two of these, both of these straddling, one north and one south of U.S. 30 here.
01:04So this would have been near the Rogers area, so just to the east of Columbus.
01:09And I'm getting pulled off here, and we're going to give you a view of what this storm is looking like as we speak.
01:14Right now, there's a big plume of dust coming with this storm.
01:18We've seen winds, and I've experienced some of these here.
01:21If you want to switch back over to the live shot here, you can get a very good idea of what this looks like right now.
01:26And you can see just this wall of dust on this storm right now.
01:30This is probably producing winds that are close to, I would almost estimate, 60, maybe approaching 70 miles per hour with this.
01:37And it could be even stronger.
01:39But you can just see how quickly this is moving here.
01:42I'll get a zoom-in shot and kind of look at the ground features here and just watch how quickly this dust is overtaking the area here.
01:49So very difficult travel right now on U.S. 30.
01:52Again, this would be just outside of North Bend.
01:55I'm a little bit just to the east of that.
01:57You can just see, again, this almost haboob-looking feature here, Jeff.
02:03We see these a lot of times on storms that have gusted out here.
02:06We have reported a lot of heavy winds.
02:09Again, blowing dust right now.
02:10I would say that this is not tornadic compared to what it was a little bit ago here.
02:15This is a lot of outflow.
02:16And, again, you're watching this live as this dust is going to slowly start to overtake me here.
02:21But right now, this is the storm we are tracking.
02:24This is one of a couple of significant storms.
02:26This likely right on the cold front.
02:28So as this moves east, especially as it gets toward the Fremont area and then over toward the Missouri border,
02:34and we're starting to get rocked pretty good here.
02:35In fact, the gust of wind that just hit, Jeff, felt like the Hulk just ran into the side of my car.
02:41So we're probably looking 60 or so miles an hour right now with the wind that's associated with this.
02:47And, again, you're watching live here is this dust.
02:49Non-tornadic, I will say at this point, non-tornadic dust, but certainly is going to create plenty of hazards for travelers.
02:56Semi-trucks here on US-30 between here and the Fremont area.
02:59So we're going to back ourselves up a little bit here, Jeff, and we're going to move a little bit east to get back out in front of this thing.
03:05All right, Tony.
03:06Pretty cool stuff here.
03:07Maybe not cool for somebody with their windows open in the area, but that is pretty fascinating.
03:11And a lot of us in the east coast never really experience a storm quite like that with the dust being kicked up.
03:18Pretty impressive stuff there, Tony.
03:20And you're well positioned here, as always.
03:23Storm chasers try to stay on the south side of rotating supercells.
03:26If you're on the north side, you're going to get hammered with hail and the wind, and the rain's going to obscure your view.
03:31So he's on the south side, so he's got a good set of eyes on that.