Storm chaser tracks down possible waterspout live on AccuWeather
AccuWeather's Tony Laubach chased down a possible waterspout during an active tornado warning in North Myrtle Beach on Aug. 6.
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00:00We are tracking a tornado, or at least a tornado risk associated with a landfalling water spout,
00:05most likely. So we want to get the latest from meteorologist and storm chaser Tony Laubach,
00:09who joins us now live from North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. There's an active
00:15scene there. The rain is coming in. And Tony, can you hear me okay?
00:22Yeah, Jeff, I can hear you just fine. Yeah, we're on the north side of North Myrtle Beach. We've
00:26been kind of watching this offshore here for about the last 20 minutes. They just issued the
00:31tornado warning. Again, this would include areas North Myrtle Beach up to Little River and then up
00:36toward Longs. We do have a pretty stout looking velocity couplet that is moving onshore right now.
00:42This has been probably the most impressive looking velocity couplet that we've seen on anything
00:48tornadic in the last couple of days. So again, this is going to be moving onshore on the north
00:53side of North Myrtle Beach. You just saw there on the stream, we've got extensive street flooding
00:58that's already taking place. That also just recently prompted a flash flood warning. So
01:04a lot going on, a lot of this happening very, very quickly just within the last 15 minutes.
01:08We are working northbound right now on Ocean Drive, about to hit the junction of State Highway 9.
01:15This is kind of where we're going to hold on and wait for this couplet to cross. We're very,
01:18very close. As you can see in the stream though, we don't have a lot of visibility. This is a very,
01:24very tough looking thing and we're going to continue to track this. We're going to turn
01:28into an open parking lot here and see if we can't get a view. But this is definitely the strongest
01:33looking couplet that we have seen. We're going to get kind of a view here up on this beach if we can
01:38and just to see if we can see it coming up onshore here. But folks in North Myrtle Beach definitely
01:44want to take your tornado precautions. We know we've had a couple of these generally pretty
01:48pretty low end, but still you don't want to take any chances. Not a lot of people on the beach right
01:52now. Again, we're kind of looking right off to the east, northeast, east-southeast I guess
01:59at this area of rotation. Again, you can't really see much on the stream and that is the visibility
02:03we are facing here. But certainly a rough storm nonetheless. We're dealing with some flash flooding
02:08in the city of North Myrtle Beach. That is going to be an issue. We'll get some video of that here
02:12once we get the tornado threat out of the way. This is a long band and I do want to show you
02:18real quickly here the tornado watch that we do have. Favorable for the potential for tornadoes.
02:26So we are certainly concerned about the potential for that. We might actually have one here if we
02:30get back on the stream. Went off in the distance here. The camera picking this up a little bit
02:34better than the naked eye. You can kind of see that bowl-shaped lowering. This is coming in
02:39on shore right now. The camera again picking this up a lot better than my naked eye is. So
02:45kind of using the stream actually as our eyes more so than our actual eyes. But that would
02:50certainly be the area that we are watching for this potential tornado. Jeff, you're looking at
02:54this live. Maybe a waterspout moving on shore. Certainly the potential is there. But you see
03:00it's hard to tell, but it's very faint. But you see that bowl lowering right in the middle of
03:04the screen. So this would be just to the right of that emergency sign right here. This certainly
03:09could be a waterspout that's about to move on the shore here in North Myrtle Beach. So again,
03:14if you're North Myrtle Beach, Foots Beach, pardon that, Princeton Place, Little River,
03:20certainly take your tornado precautions. Again, hard to tell if we've got anything on the water
03:26moving on to shore, but it certainly has that look to it. And I always like to be safer than
03:30sorry and say, hey, look, we possibly have a waterspout moving on shore. Going to be very,
03:36very difficult to see. So be be wary of that as this rolls its way on, Jeff. And we are seeing
03:43this work out pretty well, at least correlating with what you're seeing. If you're in North Myrtle
03:48Beach, you would be just left of center and passing to your left. And it looks like this
03:52is coming into the Heritage Shores neighborhood, Creekside. Earlier, I looked at the couplet,
03:57the contrasting wind from one side of the storm to the other, and we had about
04:02a 73 mile per hour contrast. Now we're down to about a 70 mile per hour contrast.