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Waterspouts turned Tornadoes hit Panama City
10/09/08 - 12:49 PM
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Justin Kiefer - bio
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Panama City, Fla:

In the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday October 8th the weather setup across the Northern Gulf and The Florida Panhandle was going through a change from being very stable to very unstable in a matter of hours. A vigorous low pressure system was located over Northern Alabama and its associated cold front was positioned just west of Mobile, AL.

Warm moist air was surging northward from the Gulf with air and dewpoint temperatures in the upper 60s to mid 70s, low level winds were from the southeast and winds at the cloud level were veering around to the southwest. With these ingredients in place, the conditions over Northwest Florida and South Alabama were becoming increasingly unstable.

Heavy showers and thunderstorms were developing over the Gulf and Florida Panhandle and moving northward. These storms began showing signs of rotation as early as 1 AM over Okaloosa County and each cell that formed had the potential to rotate. The wind shear was creating an environment in the low levels for these storms to produce tornadoes.

By 8 AM, CDT several cell were producing tornadoes over South Alabama and we were watching some isolated cells offshore that were showing rotation. Shortly after 8 AM, one of these cells was growing and moving toward St. Andrews State Park and St. Andrews Bay. When the cell moved over the Park, and The Bay Point area, a tornado touched down producing damage in the Preserve neighborhood. As the tornado emerged over the Bay, News13 received several reports of a waterspout and we wear able to captured the funnel with out tower cam from our WMBB studios in downtown Panama City.

Around 8:20 we broke into ABC programming and began continuous coverage of the tornadic waterspout as it moved northward over St. Andrews Bay heading toward Old St. Andrews and Port Panama City. A few minutes after we went on the air, the NWS in Tallahassee issued a Tornado Warning for Bay County.

We were able to track the funnel, spout and wall cloud from the descending base of the storm for 25 minutes. The original funnel lifted shortly after moving ashore between St. Andrews and Port Panama City. A few minutes later it appears the funnel re-appears and there may have been a brief touchdown again in Western Panama City near 23rd Street and Grant Ave.

It was a very busy morning with several other Tornado warnings in the Panhandle and with an especially strong cell near St George Island. Later in the day the storm prediction center in Norman Oklahoma issued a Tornado Watch for the Eastern region of the Florida Panhandle.

The NWS in Tallahassee and Mobile issued Local Storm Reports Panhandle and South Alabama and NWS has issued an Tornado Surveys classifying most of the tornado as EF-0 and EF-1 on the Enhanced Fujita tornado classification scale.

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