Vermilion went under tornado warning

For about an hour Tuesday morning, parts of Vermilion Parish went under a tornado warning. The good news is that there was no tornado spotted, according to Becky Broussard, head of the Office of Emergency Preparedness in Vermilion Parish.
The National Weather Service in Lake Charles issued a tornado warning for: southeastern Lafayette Parish in south central Louisiana around 10 in the morning on Tuesday.
The area included Lafayette and northeastern Vermilion Parish. The area includes Kaplan, Abbeville, Meaux and the North Vermilion area.
The reason for the warning is because at 10:20 a.m. the , National Weather Service meteorologists detected a severe thunderstorm capable of producing a tornado near Meaux. The storm was moving at 30 miles per hour.
When the warning was over, the National Weather Service issued a flood advisory for most of the parish after the parish received three inches of rain over a two hour period.
There is a big difference between a tornado watch and a tornado warning.
“A watch is issued when conditions are favorable, for example, either for a severe thunderstorm or tornadoes,” AccuWeather.com Senior Meteorologist Dan Kottlowski said. “It doesn’t mean severe weather is imminent.”
“Typical watches cover about 25,000 square miles,” according to the SPC.
Kottlowski said there are no set criteria for issuing watches, but if the conditions seem consistent with a developing severe weather pattern, watches can be changed and altered by monitoring ongoing developments.
“It can vary,” he said. “There is not just one set of ingredients; every watch may have a different set of perimeters from one day to the next since it is based on a synoptic situation that may change within several hours.”
Warnings mean that severe weather is imminent and is based on specific criteria and existing reports received by the NWS.
Warnings are issued through the efforts of individuals working for the NWS.
“The way a warning is issued is that a meteorologist will monitor the weather by radar and look for particular areas where there could be high impact damage,” Kottlowski said. “They will issue a warning and there will be a signature for an existing storm or developing tornado.”