Mike Peregrine the other chaser in our area has confirmed that the wedge that Kevin and I saw was in fact a tornado. Here is an excerpt from an email I received from him. Check out his website and video of the Belleville tornado.
“Hi Sally – we were just south of the 36/81 interchange on 81N.
You can take a look at a short clip of my video of this
particular event on my website, http://www.stormseason.com …
we have the entire life of this tornado from start to finish and
had a good vantage point. It was indeed rotating. It started
as a typical wall cloud (easily recognizable as such), which
then touched down in a narrow vortex that rapidly grew in size
to what is seen in your photo. You can actually catch a little
of the rotation in my video clip on the leading (left) edge of
the tornado … in the video, you can also make out the circular
bands within the meso above the tornado, indicating strong
rotation as well. This appeared to be in an open field – and it
did not hang out long. We also thought it was headed for
Belleville, but it either dissipated or veered eastward before
reaching the city limits. I am quite convinced that it was a
tornado and that the circulation reached ground level, even
though the winds next to the surface may have not actually been
very intense. It makes sense, actually – because we had
followed right behind the most intense rotation up until that
point, seeing nearly every tornado produced – and at that time,
the west side of the meso was occluding. It still looked wild
enough in the clear air that this is what everyone was paying
attention to … but the strongest rotation had already passed
along to the northeast of the occlusion. I will be showing my
video to Mike Akulow in the Topeka field office for his thoughts
on this question as well, but so far they continue to call the
event a tornado based on our reports alone.Best regards,
Mike”
