Last week I posted some thoughts on the April 2011 tornadoes. I wanted to follow-up with a few more things this week.
All of the damage surveys have been completed. A total of 30 tornadoes were confirmed across central Mississippi and northeast Louisiana. The massive severe weather outbreak in late April, which spanned from April 25th-April 28th, breaks the U.S. record for the most number of tornadoes in an outbreak. Well over 200 tornadoes have been confirmed, and some surveys are still be done.
Also alarming is the number of violent tornadoes that took place during the outbreak. 10 tornadoes have been rated EF-4, with 3 being rated EF-5. Mississippians need to pay attention to those numbers, as 2 of the 3 EF-5s were in our own state! Both of these EF-5s took place on April 27th. There have never been two EF-5 tornadoes in Mississippi on the same day.
Follow this link to view the tornadoes in our area during the super outbreak.
Thankfully as the calendar changed to May, the weather pattern across the country changed to almost summer-like. This will change later this week as a cold front out west will bring some storms, possibly severe, to our area heading into Friday.
Sorry for the lack of posts lately. More tomorrow!
Eric - elaw@wlbt.com
Monday, May 9, 2011
Monday, May 2, 2011
The April Tornadoes: Part 1
I'm back from a much needed vacation. My wife and I returned to Mississippi on Thursday, driving through some of the tornado damage in the Tuscaloosa, AL area on the way. Like me, I'm sure you are glad we are now in May and this will hopefully mean the active weather pattern we've seen this Spring will begin to quite down. Typically April is our biggest severe weather month of the year and certainly April 2011 was extremely active, perhaps even record-breaking. I want to stress that we can and do often still see severe weather in May, including tornadoes. Now isn't the time to let your guard down. In fact, in Mississippi, there is never a time to let your guard down when it comes to severe weather. You must be prepared; have plan you can put into action quickly.
I've got a lot of thoughts regarding the active April we had in the Deep South, including the historic tornado outbreak last week. I'll be sharing my thoughts in several posts this week.
Even though I was not here for last week's severe weather, I was working from 12 hours away keeping Twitter and Facebook updated. All the while watching several tornadic storms that were in my immediate area Virginia.
I've been trying to nail down exactly how many tornadoes have been confirmed in the month of April across Mississippi. Trying to do this has been problematic as there are 4 National Weather Service Forecast Offices that cover our state. Many of these offices are still doing storm surveys from last week's storms and the numbers are constantly changing. So, instead of trying to pin down an exact confirmed number right now, I can tell you that there were a total of 115 preliminary tornado reports in Mississippi. Again, these are not all confirmed, but that is still a very high number and a great majority of 115 will be confirmed.
This map shows the storm reports for Mississippi for April 2011.
Last year, there were 9 confirmed tornadoes in Mississippi. Also of note, in 2008 there were a total of 109 tornadoes...the most on record for Mississippi.1 Is it possible that we could exceed the yearly record in one month??? Damage surveys are still being done, but we may know something on this by the end of the week.
The graphic above is from the National Severe Storms Laboratory. It shows the rotation tracks of the storms from April 27th. The bright oranges and reds are the most intense rotations.
As I mentioned earlier, I checked out some of the damage in Tuscaloosa while driving back to Mississippi. Much of downtown Tuscaloosa was blocked off and I could not see anything from my vantage point. I drove I-359, the loop around Tuscaloosa, and only went a mile or so off of I-20/59 to get to where the tornado crossed. Here are some of the pictures I took of that area. You can click on them to make them larger.
The interesting graphic below shows the life-long track of the supercell storm that produced multiple strong to violent tornadoes across Alabama, including the Tuscaloosa tornado. The storm developed back over Newton County, MS (bottom left of image) and tracked northeast across Alabama, northern George, and finally fell apart in western North Carolina! The cell lasted for more than 7 hours! Incredible!! I've seen long-lived cells such as this back in Oklahoma, but never in this part of the country. No doubt a lot of research will be done on this cell in the coming years.
As horrible and horrific as the damage is Tuscaloosa, I am a bit dismayed by the early reports that the town had been wiped off the map. This is certainly not the case. But, a violent EF-4 tornado going through a populated area is bad. There were many other areas that got hit in Alabama though, some of them even worse than Tuscaloosa. In fact, the NWS has rated a tornado that went through Hackleburg, AL an EF-5. Of course, by now you know the tornado that went through Smithville, MS was also rated EF-5. There were also several violent tornadoes in northern Alabama. A good friend we know from church has an aunt that lost her house, and her aunt's family next door was killed. We need to remember all of these hard hit areas in our prayers.
I'll share more thoughts later!
1 - Even though 2008 presently holds the title for the most tornadoes in a year in the State of Mississippi, damage surveys are conducted differently in the 21st Century as compared to surveys 15-30 years ago. As a result, it is possible that tornado outbreaks in the 70s may have had more tornadoes than what is officially on record.
Eric - elaw@wlbt.com
I've got a lot of thoughts regarding the active April we had in the Deep South, including the historic tornado outbreak last week. I'll be sharing my thoughts in several posts this week.
Even though I was not here for last week's severe weather, I was working from 12 hours away keeping Twitter and Facebook updated. All the while watching several tornadic storms that were in my immediate area Virginia.
I've been trying to nail down exactly how many tornadoes have been confirmed in the month of April across Mississippi. Trying to do this has been problematic as there are 4 National Weather Service Forecast Offices that cover our state. Many of these offices are still doing storm surveys from last week's storms and the numbers are constantly changing. So, instead of trying to pin down an exact confirmed number right now, I can tell you that there were a total of 115 preliminary tornado reports in Mississippi. Again, these are not all confirmed, but that is still a very high number and a great majority of 115 will be confirmed.
This map shows the storm reports for Mississippi for April 2011.
 |
| Red dots = tornadoes; Blue dots = wind; Green dots = hail |
The graphic above is from the National Severe Storms Laboratory. It shows the rotation tracks of the storms from April 27th. The bright oranges and reds are the most intense rotations.
As I mentioned earlier, I checked out some of the damage in Tuscaloosa while driving back to Mississippi. Much of downtown Tuscaloosa was blocked off and I could not see anything from my vantage point. I drove I-359, the loop around Tuscaloosa, and only went a mile or so off of I-20/59 to get to where the tornado crossed. Here are some of the pictures I took of that area. You can click on them to make them larger.
The interesting graphic below shows the life-long track of the supercell storm that produced multiple strong to violent tornadoes across Alabama, including the Tuscaloosa tornado. The storm developed back over Newton County, MS (bottom left of image) and tracked northeast across Alabama, northern George, and finally fell apart in western North Carolina! The cell lasted for more than 7 hours! Incredible!! I've seen long-lived cells such as this back in Oklahoma, but never in this part of the country. No doubt a lot of research will be done on this cell in the coming years.
As horrible and horrific as the damage is Tuscaloosa, I am a bit dismayed by the early reports that the town had been wiped off the map. This is certainly not the case. But, a violent EF-4 tornado going through a populated area is bad. There were many other areas that got hit in Alabama though, some of them even worse than Tuscaloosa. In fact, the NWS has rated a tornado that went through Hackleburg, AL an EF-5. Of course, by now you know the tornado that went through Smithville, MS was also rated EF-5. There were also several violent tornadoes in northern Alabama. A good friend we know from church has an aunt that lost her house, and her aunt's family next door was killed. We need to remember all of these hard hit areas in our prayers.
I'll share more thoughts later!
1 - Even though 2008 presently holds the title for the most tornadoes in a year in the State of Mississippi, damage surveys are conducted differently in the 21st Century as compared to surveys 15-30 years ago. As a result, it is possible that tornado outbreaks in the 70s may have had more tornadoes than what is officially on record.
Eric - elaw@wlbt.com
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Damage Surveys & My Thoughts From Friday
Friday was a very long day. My day actually began on Thursday night. I came into work after the late news to reset all of our computers so that they would be ready to handle the large amounts of data that I knew would be pumped through them Friday. I ran into an issue with our severe weather crawl system that took me about 90 minutes to fix. I got home around 2am.
I rarely sleep before a severe weather event unfolds. I don't know why. Admittedly, severe weather does get my blood pumping. I like storms. I HATE the destruction they cause, but I have always been fascinated with them. You kind of have to be in order to be any good at forecasting them.
I did end up falling asleep around 5am. I woke up at 8:30am. By then we already had tornado warnings. Paul had been in an hour at that point. I got ready and came into work.
We remained on the air pretty much the entire day, nearly 10 hours total with only a couple of times getting enough of a break in warnings to go back to programming.
If you read my post from Wednesday, you know that I was supposed to start vacation on Wednesday. After looking at data on Tuesday and seeing the trends in the data, I called my wife after Tuesday evening's news and told her that we were going to have to postpone our trip to Virginia. I had a sick feeling about Friday. That last time I had a sick feeling about severe weather was April 24, 2010 - the Yazoo City tornado.
Paul and I were on the air tag teaming weather coverage as the supercell storm came into Hinds County from Claiborne and Warrnen counties. We had already had some reports of some damage south of Vicksburg, mainly trees power lines and power poles. The storm got stronger as it tracked closer to Raymond and my private thought was "Oh no, this is going to be bad."
A little after 11am, the tell-tell sign on radar that likely means a tornado is on the ground, showed up. It is called a debris ball. It showed up on the storm that moved across Yazoo City. A debris ball developed as the storm moved across Clinton on Friday. Here is what it looks like on radar (click image to make it larger):
I rarely sleep before a severe weather event unfolds. I don't know why. Admittedly, severe weather does get my blood pumping. I like storms. I HATE the destruction they cause, but I have always been fascinated with them. You kind of have to be in order to be any good at forecasting them.
I did end up falling asleep around 5am. I woke up at 8:30am. By then we already had tornado warnings. Paul had been in an hour at that point. I got ready and came into work.
We remained on the air pretty much the entire day, nearly 10 hours total with only a couple of times getting enough of a break in warnings to go back to programming.
If you read my post from Wednesday, you know that I was supposed to start vacation on Wednesday. After looking at data on Tuesday and seeing the trends in the data, I called my wife after Tuesday evening's news and told her that we were going to have to postpone our trip to Virginia. I had a sick feeling about Friday. That last time I had a sick feeling about severe weather was April 24, 2010 - the Yazoo City tornado.
Paul and I were on the air tag teaming weather coverage as the supercell storm came into Hinds County from Claiborne and Warrnen counties. We had already had some reports of some damage south of Vicksburg, mainly trees power lines and power poles. The storm got stronger as it tracked closer to Raymond and my private thought was "Oh no, this is going to be bad."
A little after 11am, the tell-tell sign on radar that likely means a tornado is on the ground, showed up. It is called a debris ball. It showed up on the storm that moved across Yazoo City. A debris ball developed as the storm moved across Clinton on Friday. Here is what it looks like on radar (click image to make it larger):
Doppler radar cannot actually tell us if a tornado is on the ground. But, when you see a debris ball, that is confirmation that there is a tornado and there is damage. What happens is that the debris the tornado picks up gets sucked up into the storm's updraft, high enough so the beam of the radar can detect it. The debris shows up as a higher reflective on radar due to the size. What you are seeing on radar there is likely debris from the Bank Plus building and some of the homes in Clinton and West Jackson being pulled up into the storm. As I said on the air Friday, since the storm did go across a bank, there is a possibility it picked up money. That money could have traveled across the state as the storm held together all the way into Alabama. It will be interesting to see if somebody finds some cash over the coming days.
As the storm continued to track into west Jackson, I had our skycam from Baptist Hospital aimed back to west. I never could see if rotation was on the ground, but for the first time in my career at WLBT we watched the wall cloud lower and we could clearly see the mesocyclone. Normally our storms in Mississippi are rain wrapped and you can't see storm features. That was not the case yesterday.
All of it eventually got to me. My wife and our dogs were in the path of the storm. I knew they were in our safe spot, but after the storm moved across the Hinds/Madison County line, phone service was out. When I couldn't reach home, I broke down and had to go have a few moments to regain my composure. I think that's the first time that has ever happened me to me during severe weather coverage. After a few moments in the control room, I was able to carry on with the rest of our wall to wall coverage. When I left the building about 6:30pm, it hit me again. I went home, hugged my wife, played with the dogs, and then my wife and I went to check out some of the damage. For me, seeing the damage in person and talking to the people effected helps me cope with covering such devastating storms. After last year's Yazoo City tornado, my wife and I spent several days in the tiny community of Ebenezer helping hand out supplies, along with taking supplies. We did the same thing following Hurricane Katrina. One of my elderly neighbors has quite a few large limbs down on their property, so I plan to spend Sunday afternoon helping clean that up.
Onto the damage surveys...there are still more to be done, but here is a summary of the preliminary information. Some of this may change as surveys are conducted. It will probably be Monday or Tuesday before we have a final tornado total.
Hinds County:
EF-3 Tornado; tracked from 4.5 miles southwest of Clinton to around the Old Canton/Pear Orchard Rd. area of northeast Jackson.
Max winds: 140mph
Path length: 17 miles
Max width: .3 miles
Attala County:
EF-2 Tornado; on the ground for a brief period near the Possumneck community.
Max winds: 120mph
Path length: 3 miles
Max width: 200 yards
Attala County:
EFHesterville and tracked to about 6 miles northwest of Ethel.
Max winds: 75mph
Path length: 4 miles
Max width: 75 yards
Rankin County:
EF-1 Tornado; impacted the Pisgah community. Damage survey not complete. More info. will follow in coming days.
Neshoba/Kemper Counties:
EF-3 Tornado; tornado formed just west of county road 450. The tornado remained on the ground into Alabama.
Max winds: 140mph
Path length: 38.5 miles (will be longer as tornado tracked into Alabama. This will be updated)
Max width: .75 miles
Greene County:
EF-3 Tornado; survey not completed. More info. will follow.
I'll update this post as new damage surveys come in. Surveys are being done today in northern Rankin County, southwest Leake County, and northwest Scott County. More surveys will be done Monday in Clarke, Issaquena, and Leflore Counties.
Eric - elaw@wlbt.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
 |
|
Disclaimer