COLUMBUS, Ind. — As Indiana assesses damage from the storms earlier this week and work has begun to clean up and rebuild, meteorologists are breaking down what happened. Dr. David Call, a meteorology professor at Ball State University, says the tornado outbreak was not projected by computer models.
“Yesterday’s weather pattern typically does not result in a tornado outbreak,” said Call, who annually leads storm chase classes across the Great Plains during the early summer months. “That is why most forecasters and computer models did not project them. In fact, there were doubts that thunderstorms would form at all.”
Call speculates that there could have been a variable or a seemingly insignificant piece of data that was not considered while the computer model was calculated. This he says is a good thing, because those conditions can now be factored into future forecasts that might contain similar patterns.