WHY THE PENSACOLA TORNADO HAD NO WARNING… Damage happened around 4:20PM earlier today due to a tornado that moved north across parts of the Pensacola metro. Quite frankly, it is a near “worst case scenario” to have a tornado moving through a highly populated area causing damage and injuries. I saw a few comments alluding to some injuries caused by the tornado but I cannot independently confirm that injuries happened. Fortunately, I have heard of no fatalities. The damage appears consistent with EF1-rated damage but we will have to wait for the National Weather Service to send out their storm survey team tomorrow morning to get an official ranking.
The reason no tornado warning was in effect at the time the tornado happened: Any reasonable meteorologist would never issue a tornado warning based on the signature at the time. If I had not known a tornado happened, and you showed me the radar image (reflectivity and velocity), 100 out of 100 times, I wouldn’t issue a warning if I were a National Weather Service meteorologist.
The low-level rotation simply was not visible from the Mobile, AL radar or the Eglin AFB radar. The Mobile radar has the lowest beam height at about 3,000 ft. above Pensacola while Eglin has the lowest beam height at about 5,000 ft. There was zero semblance of a tornado being down on the local radars. There was very weak, broad rotation in MANY of the storms today. The tornado originated from a low-topped shower. I wouldn’t even call it a thunderstorm, as there was not lightning observed at the time. You technically could call it a supercell since it produced a tornado, but this was a shallow, tiny shower that tapped into the very lowest levels of the atmosphere where instability was maximized. You go up several thousand feet and nothing is going on because the air is stable.
Low-topped cells happen multiple times per year across our local area, which makes our local area highly unusual in that aspect. The only other place in America that consistently sees this phenomenon is the Central Valley of California, but even there, these low-topped cells are not as frequent as the ones that happen here. One local NWS meteorologist refers to these showers as “mini-spinnys” as the showers that produce these areas of rotation are quite tiny compared to the larger storms that usually produce tornadoes.
You may be wondering: Why wasn’t a warning issued when reports started coming in? That is a good thought, but the practicality isn’t there. By the time a warning would have gone out, the tornado would’ve been long gone and lifted. Again, being quite frank here, it would not have been helpful to issue a downstream warning (in Pace, Milton) either as the storm produced no known damage in those communities. This truly was a unique situation.
So why not just blanket every rotation area with a tornado warning? Because if the local National Weather Service had chosen to go that route, we would have had hours of nonstop tornado warnings – with potentially only one or two actually verifying. The false alarm ratio, as it is known, would have been sky high. 95% failure rate. Not good!
An unwarned tornado. It has happened before, and it WILL, unfortunately, happen again. Fortunately, nearly all tornadoes these days in the United States have a tornado warning in effect before the tornado strikes. This one did not, underscoring the need to always have at least some level of weather awareness!
Tornadoes possible Wednesday into early Thursday. I will have your next full forecast video posted by 7:15AM tomorrow morning. Have a good night!