Unconfirmed tornado touchdown in Show Low Az.

[azsnowman]

Unconfirmed reports of a tornado touching down in SHow Low Az. approx. 1 hour ago, Torreon Golf Club sustained the most damage according to the scanner....3 houses leveled with 2 possible injuries!!

[Category 5]

I don't know exactly where that is but the SPC makes no mention. However if 3 homes were "levelled" It needs to be looked into immediately.

[azsnowman]

OK...I drove down there to be a looky loo and from my unexperienced eye it did NOT appear to be a tornado, I've seen micro burst damage first hand and to me, this damage is very indicative of a MAJOR micro burst! The 3 homes involved had their roofs blown completly off...trees uprooted, a boat in a tree!

Reports from Show Low Muni stated 3" of rain fell in a 1/2 hour period, now THAT I believe...MAJOR flooding issues from Lakeside to Show Low, I received .92" in an hour!

[Category 5]

Microburst damage can be mistaken for tornado damage.

Sounds like one nasty microburst from the discription.

[azskyman]

Hello and good morning Dennis. I was watching those storms on radar imagery (actually hoping they would hold together until they arrived here in the valley), and from what I could see there was some very localized, but major downburst activity taking place about that time.

For those who lost their homes, doesn't matter whether it was a tornado or not. They still have to pick up the pieces and start over.

Glad you are getting some rain up your way. Sparse in my back yard so far this monsoon, but some very nice rains around the state.

Sorry to hear about the damage.

[Category 5]

Are there any pictures?

[artist]

how can a microburst be identified on radar? I appreciate any answers you can give me.

[Category 5]

how can a microburst be identified on radar? I appreciate any answers you can give me.

I was actually about to ask that. I'd think they'd have warnings for them if they could though.

[alicia-w]

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/topics/attach/html/ssd9643.htm

[alicia-w]

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_ ... mber=11378

[azskyman]

Here in AZ, microbursts are far more common than the rare tornado for a number of reasons. But funnel clouds aloft are actually not uncommon. I have seen two in recent days.

My comments about "seeing a downburst" on radar are based simply on the various reflectivity samples at the time of an event plus a growing history of how those "signatures" translate into the actual rain events on the ground.

Also downbursts with likely microburst winds are often clearly visible from thirty miles or more here in Arizona. At our Skywarn training sessions, time is spent on what a microburst physically looks like from such a distance.

Monsoon season rains in Arizona most often come in the form of potent heat-of-the-day thunderstorms. And the rains that they can produce fall at rates of 1-2" per hour or greater. With little if any steering current aloft in the jet stream, the net result is quite often a signficant downburst.

It may be a dangerous assumption to make, but even with radar signatures like the one near Show Low that day, I generally dismiss the possibility that this time of year would produce an on-the-ground tornado.

But I do know what it is like at the outflow boundary of a storm like that.

And I believe that downburst winds right here where I work (near Deer Valley Airport in Phoenix) were clocked in excess of 110 mph during a storm event a number of years ago.

Anyway, that's my explanation for how I interpret downbursts from radar signatures. The same rules did not necessarily apply when I lived in the Midwest.

[Aslkahuna]

Actual instantaneous rainfall rates in AZ can approach 12 inches per hour even though the total in an hour may be 2 inches or so. In 2003, we had a thunderstorm dump up to 4 inches in SV in 20 minutes. I computed a maximum rainfall rate of 7.2 inches/hr during a 1986 thunderstorm at Fort Huachuca from the recording rainguage record.

Steve