Ingredients made K.C., not Topeka, prime spot for twisters

Topeka Capital-Journal, The, May 6, 2003 by Capital-Journal

The Capital-Journal

Three severe storm ingredients combined Sunday to bring deadly tornadoes to the Kansas City area rather than Topeka, said Bruce Jones, chief meteorologist for KSNT-TV Channel 27.

Sunday's storms brewed in a rough north-south line over Holton, Topeka and Burlington but didn't become severe until they were over Leavenworth and Miami counties, said Mike Akulow, warning coordinator meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Topeka.

Akulow said tornadoes struck northeast Kansas communities that included Kansas City, Kan., in Wyandotte County, and Basehor in Leavenworth County. He said the twisters stemmed from "one main storm system" that passed into the Kansas City area before it erupted into tornadoes.

Jones identified three factors which ensured severe storms would strike Kansas City rather than Topeka:

- Surface winds and upper-level winds were colliding Sunday in the Kansas City area.

- The Kansas City area on Sunday was just east or northeast of an area of low pressure.

- That area on Sunday was just to the north of a "moisture plume" of warm, moist air coming in from the south.

David Beusterien, a meteorologist in the weather service's Kansas City-Pleasant Hill, Mo., office, said Monday that the weather service still was conducting surveys that would determine the ratings of Sunday's tornadoes on the Fujita scale. The scale, which rates tornadoes at levels from F-0 at the lowest to F-5 at the highest, is designed to relate the degree of damage to the intensity of the wind.

Akulow said tornadoes on Sunday killed seven people in Kansas --- one in Wyandotte County in northeast Kansas and three each in Cherokee and Crawford counties, both in southeast Kansas. That marked the state's worst tornado death toll for a single day since April 26, 1991, when an F-5 twister killed 17 people, including 13 at Andover in Sedgwick County.