The second major tornado outbreak of the year took place on 14 April 2012 (after the 2 March outbreak that slammed Indiana and Kentucky). At last count, 115 tornadoes were reported from Oklahoma to Iowa. Credit must be given to the Storm Prediction Center, National Weather Service offices, and local TV and other media outlets for accurately predicting the severe weather event and keeping people informed as it happened, and the people of the area for paying attention to the weather. It must be counted as a success on many levels that 115 tornadoes over 4 states only resulted in 6 deaths (and those deaths occurred in the toughest situation to warn people – a rain-wrapped tornado in the middle of the night where the tornado sirens were disabled due to a lightning strike earlier in the day).
The last bout of severe weather occurred with a squall line that formed in the late evening (~02:30 UTC 15 April 2012) along the dry line in western Texas and quickly expanded into Oklahoma and Kansas. This line produced the deadly tornado in Woodward, OK, along with many reports of 1-2″ diameter hail. Suomi-NPP passed over this line of storms between 07:45 and 07:50 UTC (15 April). The high resolution infrared window band, I-5 (11.45 µm), shows the immense scale of this storm system stretching from Wisconsin and Minnesota to Texas, in great detail. Be sure to click on the image, then on the “1497×1953” link below the banner to see it in full resolution. (The full resolution image is ~2MB in size.)
View of the squall line over the Central Plains from VIIRS channel I-5, 7:45 UTC 15 April 2012
The color scale here is the same one used for the 2 March 2012 tornado outbreak image and the 25 January squall line over southeast Texas. The darkest blue pixels visible amongst the white overshooting tops (more easily visible on the southern end of the squall line) have a brightness temperature below -77 C, indicative of very strong convection.