Twitter
Facebook
| News - Tornadoes | |||
| Written by Heidi Farrar | |||
| Thursday, 14 January 2010 08:42 | |||
 Prior to TVN's trip to Argentina, Reed established a solid connection with meteorologists Ramiro Saurral, Matías Bertolotti and othersfrom the University of Buenos Aires. They're very passionate about meteorology and are highly enthusiastic about storm chasing! On Monday, Ramiro, Matías and Ricardo Vidal chased a dynamic setup in the Pampas, which Reed and crew were very sorry to have missed due to having to fly home on Sunday; this is their account and video, the latter of which displays some of the most impressive storm structure you'll ever see. -Watch for futureblog updates from Storm Chase Argentina!Ramiro and Matías report:
"We left Buenos Aires at 7:00 am and moved due west, to General Villegas, located on route 188 in the border between Buenos Aires and La Pampa, thinking that the activity would start at about 3pm, as the models were suggesting. But once again, as the day we chased with you in Córdoba, models did not handle this situation properly, especially in terms of moisture and instability, and with the 12 UTC soundings we realized that instability was more intense and that the LLJ was blowing at about 50 kts over the area. When we arrived to La Pampa (General Pico), there were already supercells forming south of Santa Rosa. Then, we took rout 35 toward Santa Rosa, but not getting there so as to not get inside the convection... we decided to turn right (westward) so as to remain away of the convection but still being able to see the bases, as we learned from you. In the Santa Rosa radar we saw by that time that many systems to our west were already doing splitting and becoming SC (super cellular)very rapidly, so we decided to take route 10 westward (the famous route that takes to Santa Isabel), and after 70 km we turn right (northward) once again, so as to remain ahead of the rain/hail activity. In those 70 km we really saw some very nice thunderstorms, with very interesting bases (captured in the videos and pictures) and heavy lightning activity.We stayed there about 30 minuted because one of the bases was showing signs of rotation and was coming towards us, and we left just before it hit us because we were not having hail insurance. ... We made some 20 km northward and the route turns northeast, toward route 35, and we stopped there because another very nice system was coming to us. That was really a textbook supercell there, with lots of lightning strikes and some incredible mammatus clouds. When the cell really came close to us, heavy rain obscured the base and so we moved away, getting back to route 35, some 80 km north of Santa Rosa. By that time, the SC was in its mature stage and was still growing larger in size and was in fact becoming a huge system/cluster, as new cells formed too. Differently from what we saw last week with you, here the thunderstorms turned to become aligned quite rapidly. This cell was really amazing, and triggered a gust front that produced gusty winds in excess of 80 mph over Santa Rosa, knocking down many power lines. Therest of the chase was all related to that cell: before the system we were under very warm and moist conditions (93 over 76) and after the passage of the gust front, temperatures quickly dropped to 70°F. We moved rapidly north, getting once again into the warm air. Our idea was to sleep in General Villegas, which was about 100 km far from where we were. When we made it to route 188 and turned east, the spectacle was amazing: Ramiro was having doubt about our chances to get to Villegas before the rain hit, but anyway we decided to move there as quickly as possible. While we were driving toward Villegas, the lightning activity really became impressive (as seen inthe video), with all sort of low clouds hanging from the base of the SC. We did not see any tornado there, but some funnels could be detected. It took us about 1 hour to get to Villegas but we did it safely, and just after we got there, the SC hammered the city with very heavy rain and very strong winds. The morning after, when we drove back to Buenos Aires, we saw a lot of fallen trees, especially near Salto City, and also over Buenos Aires City."
|
|||
| Last Updated on Thursday, 14 January 2010 09:19 |
You need to login or register to post comments.
Discuss this item on the forums. (0 posts)
Comments
LTA, Uncle Jim
Very Good and we will continue reporting from Argentina (muy bueno y seguiremos reportando desde Argentina)
The storm appeared to have 'horns' - the spiked clouds above the leading edge!
Glorious lightning and such an enormous cell!
Just...WOW!!
RSS feed for comments to this post