{"id":70879,"date":"2026-06-18T19:50:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T19:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/?p=70879"},"modified":"2026-06-18T19:50:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T19:50:12","slug":"tornadoes-hit-the-midwest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/archives\/70879","title":{"rendered":"Tornadoes Hit the Midwest"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the afternoon and evening of 17 June 2026, a series of tornadoes struck the states of Illinois and Indiana. As of the writing of this post (1600 UTC on 18 June) the SPC Storm Reports only indicate tornadoes in Illinois, but remotely-sensed observations indicate that the likelihood of a significant tornado in south-central Indiana was high.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’ll start, though, by looking at the larger scale setup for this event. Here’s the 1200 UTC 250 hPa chart courtesy of NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center<\/a>. A quick glance shows an elongated jet streak extending from central British Columbia all the way to the Dakotas, with a small shortwave trough over Iowa. However, as we noted a few days ago<\/a>, there’s a significant number of 1200 UTC radiosondes that aren’t being launched. It’s therefore reasonable to look to an alternate data source to confirm how well this analysis matches reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"250<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Fortunately, satellites can support such a sanity check. The water vapor channels are able to detect the motion of clear air. There are three such channels aboard the GOES Advanced Baseline Imager, and each is sensitive to water vapor in a different part of the atmosphere. Band 8 (6.19 microns) is in a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum where water vapor absorbs very strongly, therefore it is mostly sensing information near the top of the atmosphere. Let’s take a look at what that looked like around 1200 UTC. Here, we see that the general flow pattern identified by the 250 hPa chart in the western continental United States is correct, though there might be some hints of wiggles in the actual flow that don’t necessarily show up in the analyzed map.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Band<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It’s that shortwave over the upper Mississippi Valley that is of greatest interest to this particular case. This isn’t really an example of boundary-driven convection initiation as we see with fronts. Those boundaries were much to the west or north of where we saw convection initiate, and thus it’s the dynamical influence of the upper-level flow that really helped the storms to get going. Let”s take a look at the initiation, this time using the high resolution Band 2 visible imagery. This loop covers 1800 to 2100 UTC and shows a line of storms firing from north central Indiana to eastern Kansas. Embedded in the laerge cloud shield in the right side of the loop was an initial round of storms that largely brougt strong winds to the area. However, it is those storms firing up along the line that proved to be a more significant concern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Band<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As this line moved to the south, it formed embedded tornadoes in west central Illinois. The tornadoes were reported between 2330 and 130 UTC. By 0200 UTC the storms were well into Indiana where they were continuing to cause destruction. Here is a view of the mesoscale sector 1 minute Band 13 Infrared channel. Note the presence of multiple overshooting tops in close proximity to each other in the center of the loop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Loop<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Again, as of press time, there was no recorded tornado report in Indiana for this event. However, the Doppler radar at Indianapolis showed strong evidence of tornadic conditions. Here’s a loop of the storm relative velocity (left) and reflectivity (right) for south central Indiana from 0115 UTC to 0300 UTC. There is a tight couplet that moves due east across the center of the image just south of Martinsville and a broader and weaker center of circulation that propagates to the southeast across Bloomington.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Loop<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Here’s a single time step from the radar loop, showing the storm relative velocity (left), correlation coefficient (center), and reflectivity (right). The ball of blue in the center panel, at the same location as a tight velocity couplet and very high reflectivity levels, likely represents debris in the air. The closer the correlation coefficient is to 1.0, the more spherical the scatterers. As this storm moved across the Morgan-Monroe State Forest, it likely kicked up a substantial amount of tree debris (which is clearly aspherical) causing it to appear this way on the radar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Three<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the afternoon and evening of 17 June 2026, a series of tornadoes struck the states of Illinois and Indiana. As of the writing of this post (1600 UTC on 18 June) the SPC Storm Reports only indicate tornadoes in Illinois, but remotely-sensed observations indicate that the likelihood of a significant tornado in south-central Indiana […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":70889,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,159,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general-interpretation","category-goes-19","category-severe-convection"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70879"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70890,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70879\/revisions\/70890"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}