RTE tornado report

sunset

RTE reported a tornado for Dunboyne and Ashbourne on 11th May and the thunderstorm thread here referred to it. While damage reports are around for Dunboyne, I can find no reference to Ashbourne. Can anyone help, please? Surely the local press had something. I am beginning to think the Ashbourne report was a mistake by RTE (not the first!).

rc28

I havn't heard anything other than that news report about the Ashbourne damage. Dunboyne's damage was cleaned up reallly quick but someones entire greenhouse was blown into the village green and nobody ever claimed it. People said it just came out of the sky!

sunset

A lot of folk have accessed this thread to date and no direct information seems to be forthcoming. This strengthens the possibility that the Ashbourne report is unlikely to be accurate. But the greenhouse on Dunboyne green is an interesting story. That was pretty dangerous. Some poor gardener is scratching his/her head and wondering......

Jambo

Folks I noticed yesterday someone had posted a video on youtube of the aftermath of the "Dunboyne Tornado " , as for the greenhouse I noticed a few weeks ago one had blown down near the entrance to Woodview heights but this would be just pushing it distance wise for it to be dumped on the green ..

Heres the link for the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLRKczqnZ8w

sunset

That's a good link. The video has some good clear images and even shows what must be part of the greenhouse referred to above. In terms of tornado damage this seems slight, because some of the things not damaged are also striking. Ashbourne, if damaged at all, probably had even less severe impacts.

rc28

A video of the funnel and the report can be found here:
http://dev.rte.ie/news/2007/0511/tornado.html

From what I've heard it came through so quickly (literally about 5-10seconds) that it never got a chance to do more damage but it did take tiles from rooves and if the guy filming that video had bothered to go to nearby park (not the villlage green where he was) he would have seen the really big branches that came down and one whole mature tree. As for the surrounding areas the funnel only seemed to touch down in the middle of the village so not much happened away from there except small branches snapped from saplings in new estates and many of them are kind of leaning sideways in the same direction. Also I heard that quite a few back garden sheds were tossed around the place and small objects (like trampolines!) ending up in someones garden down the street.

sunset

I think the 5-10 secs must be the time any one person saw it paqss his/her window etc, rather than the duration of the storm. The video clip shows a car moving. It takes 1-2 secs for it to pass by. In that time the funnel hardly moves. Indeed, it seems to be in the countryside approaching the village at that point. It had yet to pass through the centre and do all the damage referred to. So its real duration must have been measured in minutes - quite a lot of them.

rc28

sunset wrote:

I think the 5-10 secs must be the time any one person saw it paqss his/her window etc, rather than the duration of the storm. The video clip shows a car moving. It takes 1-2 secs for it to pass by. In that time the funnel hardly moves. Indeed, it seems to be in the countryside approaching the village at that point. It had yet to pass through the centre and do all the damage referred to. So its real duration must have been measured in minutes - quite a lot of them.

:rolleyes:
I know it's not the actual duration of the storm, I meant that the 5-10 secs was the time the funnel actually made closest contact with the ground and when the strongest winds passed through. I have spoken to many people who were there and all say the really violent winds that did the damage only lasted for 5-10secs and is it had lasted any longer there would have been way worse damage.

Snowbie

Came across this by accident,never heard of it before.
Describes the phenomena we mostly get in this country?
Although the media still like to use mini-tornado as a description.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustnado

sunset

Just a few thoughts on that article (because nothing in Wikepedia can be guaranteed as being correct). 'Gustnado' is a term used by chasers in the US, partly because they can see a funnel developing and can distinguish between one process and another fairly easily. But its a slang term and sometimes used in a confusing way. The description of 'whirlwind' in that article differs from normal use. Whirlwind is a generic term. All rotating vortices, whether tornadoes or dust devils are whirlwinds - that's the obvious meaning of the word and it has always been used as such. A tornado is just one type of whirlwind. The term mini-tornado is meaningless. It has been popularly used, especially in Ireland, to describe lots of whirlwind types from dust devils to funnel clouds. It is best avoided. Simplicity is best. The Dunboyne event appears to have been a genuine tornado since it was seen to belong to a parent cloud.

rc28

sunset wrote:

The Dunboyne event appears to have been a genuine tornado since it was seen to belong to a parent cloud.

I agree as the funnel was actually filmed descending from the t-storm and many witness reports of the funnel. It was officially recorded on estofex as a tornado and rte and bbc called it a tornado too.

Lirange

I don't know if there is an actual video of this purported funnel. But the video in the RTE link does not show a funnel. There is no rotation. It looks like a low cloud bank to me.

rc28

Lirange wrote:

I don't know if there is an actual video of this purported funnel. But the video in the RTE link does not show a funnel. There is no rotation. It looks like a low cloud bank to me.

You're the first to say that after I've shown it to many people on the UK weather forums and they have good knowledge of the weather. They never said it wasn't a funnel. There were many witnesses of the funnel cloud from what I've heard.

Lirange

A funnel (waterspout) or tornado precursor will be more conical in shape. It will also have a clearly visible rotation from that range.

I seriously doubt the cloud formation in the RTE video and the reported tornado that caused the damage in Dunboyne are the same.

Share it on one of the U.S. based storm chaser forums and see if they agree.

sunset

rc28 wrote:

It was officially recorded on estofex as a tornado and rte and bbc called it a tornado too.

.

Its worth noting that estofex is merely a reporting tool and anyone can put anything on it. Reports there are often 2nd or 3rd hand at least. It does not constitute an 'official record'. Quotes by RTE and the BBC also have no status. They are merely repeating what someone has reported in. Information gets mangled in the process as, I suspect, in so in the case of the Ashbourne report. So none of these reports are reliable for either confirming that the even happened at all or in confirming the nature of the event.