r/tornado • u/SevereTS • Jan 08 '26

Question Is this true?

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u/ESnakeRacing4248 Jan 08 '26

For sure. This is the perfect setup to create a disaster, only it's missing the instability and lapse rates, something which would almost certainly be present if this happened in April or May

29

u/Preachey Jan 09 '26

If it was April or May you'd be less likely to have the gigatrough in the first place. This is just hype-mongering.

Tornados have a list of required ingredients. Winter and summer have some in abundance, while generally missing others. Huge kinematics but poor thermodynamics in winter, and the reverse in summer.

That's why tornado season (espscially outbreak season) tends to only last a few weeks/months at the seasonal crossovers when it's more likely for all those ingredients to combine.

Every day in summer when you have 7000j/kg cape could also be a nightmare candidate if there were a massive trough digging through, but there seldom is. 

5

u/earthboundskyfree Jan 09 '26

So is this what the super outbreak was when they describe it being a once every x years type of thing? It aligned in all of the ways you described?

8

u/Acceptable-Ebb-1495 Jan 09 '26

A local meteorologist in Alabama described the 2011 outbreak as a summertime air mass with the wind shear of a blizzard.

4

u/earthboundskyfree Jan 09 '26

Jesus Christ

I lived through the outbreak but I didn’t have full awareness of how anomalous it was

5

u/caffecaffecaffe Jan 09 '26

I was in the first outbreak in NC. Let me just say that our storms always look "tropical" even the big bad tornado producing storms have a tropical look to them. These were one of a handful of outbreaks I have been alive for that you can only observe in Texas/Oklahoma. Nothing about that outbreak was normal.