Severe thunderstorms rumble through Colorado's Front Range

  • 2 weeks ago
AccuWeather's Tony Laubach reported live from Colorado as thunderstorms brought a risk for landspout tornadoes to the region.
Transcript
00:00For an even closer look, we are joined now by AccuWeather meteorologist Tony Laubach in northern Colorado, and Tony, we had some storms yesterday, we've had a few tornado threats in the areas not far from Brush, Colorado, and we're back at it again today.
00:14Yeah, Jeff, we are certainly back at it. I'm just north of Deer Trail. This would be right along the Adams-Arapahoe County line here along US-36. I'm pulled over here to the side of the road, just got blasted with a storm that is currently not severe-warned.
00:32About 15 minutes ago it was, though we saw some gusty winds. Over 60 mph easy. Did knock down a couple of trees on one of the roads there north of the town of Deer Trail. Fortunately, the storm moving at a pretty good clip as it's moving its way east.
00:45Actually, a big line of storms right now. We're going to show you the radar here because we've got a peppering of storms up and down the Colorado Front Range here as these slide into the eastern plains.
00:55You mentioned all the way from the Nebraska Panhandle south toward the Colorado Springs area, though not a lot of warnings at this particular moment. A lot of these storms are more pulse-y in nature, so they kind of intensify. We see the warnings at one point, we had about six warnings there along the Front Range, but things have since quieted down as we're seeing the new round of storms start to develop ahead of what is now kind of the main line of storms that's stretching from Kimball all the way to Colorado Springs.
01:22We do have a new severe thunderstorm watch that was issued within the last hour. This severe thunderstorm watch covers a good chunk of eastern Colorado, northeastern Colorado, and that's going until later this evening, approximately 1 a.m. mountain daylight time. That's unusually late for this neck of the woods. Typically, we get these storms on out of here pretty early in the evening, but we've got that watch until 1 a.m.
01:48And again, that covers portions of southwest Nebraska and northwest Kansas as well. As these storms work their way on off to the east, we do expect a window, Jeff, probably about an hour or so before the sun sets where we could see some spin-ups on the leading edge of this and any isolated storms that form ahead of this line might produce a tornado.
02:08Again, a small window there probably about the hour or so before sunset when we kind of get the overlapping of ingredients, the low-level jet picks up, and we see the temperatures cool, so it brings those cloud bases down a little. So that'll be the concern window we'll be watching as we move further east here over the next couple hours.
02:24All right, Tony. Well, be safe out there. I know you're a man of many, many years of experience doing this, and you're basically in your own backyard now. So we'll have some more hailers to track and some big thunderstorms.
02:36Risk of landspout tornadoes. I saw, Tony, that there were a couple of reports earlier. It doesn't look like much fanfare, but in the Broomfield area near Boulder, in Boulder County at least, there was a brief landspout tornado. It lasted less than a minute, and the Weather Service decided not to issue a warning for it.
02:51Sometimes these brief landspouts, there are good eyes on them, and they don't always impact populated places. So sometimes the Weather Service will choose to issue a special weather statement just to say, hey, there are landspouts in a few spots. We're keeping an eye on them, but they're not going to impact people.

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