MPR’s Cathy Wurzer talks with meteorologist Craig Edwards about a memorable August 24th, which brought destructive hail and tornadoes to southern areas of the state. Edwards details what transpired.
On August 24, 2005, tornadoes were reported over south-central Minnesota. The largest tornado began 4 miles west-southwest of Nicollet and moved due east, dissipating near Waterville in Le Sueur County. The tornado damaged farms and homes. It also left 37 injured, and caused the death of an elderly man at Lake Emily near Kasota. This was the first death due to a tornado in Minnesota in six years. Another component of storms was large and destructive hail over southern Minnesota. The largest hail reported was grapefruit size at New Prage in Scott County.
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SPEAKER: People in cities across the southern half of the state are assessing damage this morning from storms that brought seven reported tornadoes and up to grapefruit-sized hail. One death was reported in Kasota, Minnesota. That's near Mankato.
A number of other people have been injured.
Joining us this morning after working the overnight shift is Craig Edwards, meteorologist in charge with the National Weather Service office in Chanhassen. Good morning, Craig.
CRAIG EDWARDS: Good morning, Kathy.
SPEAKER: Thanks for joining us.
CRAIG EDWARDS: My pleasure.
SPEAKER: Well, I have to give you credit. Yesterday morning at this time, I was sitting here and I was talking about the possibility of severe weather in southern Minnesota, mainly. And you nailed it right on the head.
CRAIG EDWARDS: Yeah. It was a great performance, and I got a lot of tired forecasters who put in 12-hour shifts yesterday. Because we had two main events. Of course, the first event was the severe hail that occurred down to the south of us, toward New Prague and Northfield that just hammered with near-historical-type-size hail that-- unbelievable, the type of hail that is certainly memorable and especially with the damage we saw, and then the second event, which was the tornado event that began in Nicollet about 5 o'clock last night.
SPEAKER: Can you tell me what happened to make all this transpire? Yesterday morning, we watched that-- as you say, this first line go through with these huge hailstones. And I suppose when you see hail the size of grapefruit, you must think that that could be a precursor to tornadic activity.
CRAIG EDWARDS: Well, that's exactly what happened, that we had an atmosphere that was ripe for severe weather. And quite honestly, all of southern Minnesota was just primed and volatile. And once we started seeing that, how juiced up it was with the hail that-- you got a lot of turbulence and a lot of upward motion going on in the clouds when you're getting hail the size of baseballs.
And then as that sort of settled down at the lunch hour, a boundary developed that was produced, temperatures that were well into the 80s, while the Twin Cities sat with the temperature around 70 degrees. So the atmosphere was primed from Redwood Falls to Mankato. And about 5 o'clock, a thunderstorm formed just west of Nicollet, and within a matter of about five minutes, it was strong enough to produce circulation that triggered the first tornado.
SPEAKER: Do we have any clue at this point, Craig, as to the size of these tornadoes? I've seen some pictures. Some of the funnels were fairly large. Others were those smaller rope-like varieties.
CRAIG EDWARDS: Right. Well, pictures don't lie. So when you see the type of wedge that we had, I would think that, from what I saw, it's going to be maybe just short of a quarter-mile wide at the biggest. At the time, it was the largest producing damage.
And then it ropes out. So the tornado just all of a sudden doesn't blossom into this humongous storm. So it does need time to generate some energy, and so that's why we see different images. And it could have well been the same tornado, just at different stages.
SPEAKER: At this point in the game, do you send your meteorologists into the field, say, today to look at damage to figure out what exactly happened?
CRAIG EDWARDS: Well, we got to get people out there right away. And it's unfortunate that we're really not staffed to put together a team of people. So what happens is pretty much the meteorologists have worked a 12-hour shift, get a few hours' sleep. And Todd Krause is going to be one of those meteorologists down there today as our main expert in looking at this. And he was trying to grab another meteorologist to go with him.
So, essentially, it's going to get down to two meteorologists from the Weather Service that are out there this morning that are going to try to lay out a path and put some historical perspective to this tornado that occurred.
SPEAKER: And how helpful is that for forecasters and say, in the years to come to know about these storms yesterday?
CRAIG EDWARDS: Well, it's very helpful, because when we get to the severe weather season the following year, we're able to look at the information, what we call the storm environment and what we call the signatures we're looking at on radar, so that perhaps we can see subtle clues that would give us another two or three minutes of lead time that a tornado is forming. So these are replayed over and over again.
Meteorologists from across the country can examine our information and say, when I see something like this, given the environment, I will put out a tornado warning without hesitation.