NWS Says Lake County Tornado Developed Too Quickly To Give Out Advanced Warning
(CBS) -- Sunday's tornado touchdown in Lake County has been the subject of a lot of discussion because most people were alerted after the storm had already passed.
The National Weather service says the tornado developed too quickly to give people in its path advance warning.
Eric Lenning, Science and Operations Officer for the National Weather Service, says reports that the tornado literally came in under the radar are not correct.
"It is possible for tornadoes to be shallow enough that they're not actually detected on our radar," Lenning says. "It's also possible for them to form so quickly that they don't show up on radar until they're also on the ground. In this case it was more of the latter. It was a very quickly developing storm. We were watching it on the radar but by the time we decided to issue a warning we were already getting reports of the funnel cloud."
He says five radar systems cover the area where the tornado touched down.
The state of the science, he says, only allows for tornado lead times in minutes, at best.