Another Missed Tornado Warning

I've written up fewer of the National Weather Service's missed tornado warnings this summer because I fear they have become repetitive reading. However, because yesterday evening's situation in northern South Dakota was straightforward, it is quite concerning no tornado warning was issued.  

I am publishing the Twitter/X advisories that I provided to my followers not to boast but to disprove the National Weather Service's (NWS) past contentions of "Monday morning quarterbacking" which are silly. That said, if I was able to provide advance warnings from Wichita, there is no reason the NWS local office serving northern South Dakota couldn't, also. 

6:14pm Advisory:

While there were issues with the North Dakota tornado situation ("T" above), let's focus on South Dakota in this posting. The southern circle (orange arrow) showed an area of rapidly increasing rotation (right panel, below) in the Doppler wind data. 

If the NWS or other organization is going to provide the public or clients advance warning, a warning should be issued when rotation rapidly increases given a highly conductive atmosphere for tornadoes which was in place last night. 

6:21pm Advisory

A hook echo had formed in the vicinity of the rotation. We've known that there is an association between hooks and tornadoes since the late 1940's. Note the bold type and concern in this message. 

The Tornado Report

I believe this was Mountain time, which would have put the tornado at about 6:39pm CDT. I do not have the radar from this time because the 30 year-old radar at Bismarck failed just after the 6:22pm data cycle and didn't come back up until about 6:40pm. These failures are increasingly common, especially in dangerous weather situations. If the time is correct, my advisories provided about 15 minutes of lead-time.

You can see a small debris area on the horizon just above and slightly right of the left tree, which confirms the tornado's circulation reached the ground. 

While there have been much more egregious NWS tornado warning misses, it has become apparent in recent months that most NWS offices these days rarely -- if ever -- issue a tornado warning before the first tornado of the day has been reported [on the ground]. They will become more amenable to issuing advance tornado warnings on the second, third, fourth, et cetera, tornadoes of the day. 

The problem is the first tornado of the day may be in a highly populated area like Joplin. The very definition of a "warning" is to inform people in advance so they may protect themselves. The NWS's reluctance to issue tornado warnings in some situations is unacceptable.