2011: Raleigh, NC….Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, AL…Joplin, MO…Springfield, MA
1953: Flint, MI…Worcester, MA…Waco, TX
Not much to say about this…it was awe-inspiring to watch as it happened yesterday, and it happened in an area I’m very familiar with, so it hit close to home. But a couple words on it….
Tornadoes don’t have personality….they don’t pick and choose to destroy some houses and spare others. They don’t choose to form on certain days and choose not to on others. If the right ingredients come together over any given location, a tornado can develop. And in 1953 and now in 2011, it’s just so happened that several of the areas impacted by tornadoes have been large communities and unfortunately they’ve been large tornadoes in many cases.
Weather Scope App for iPad image of Doppler Velocity near Monson, MA
If Springfield, MA should teach you one thing, it’s this: It does not matter where you live or what you remember or were taught about the weather in your town: If the right set of ingredients comes together at the right time, a large, destructive tornado can develop and can do serious, life threatening damage. What you see on the left…that’s something straight out of the Midwest or Plains. But that’s over Massachusetts. It can happen to you, and yesterday is a textbook example of why you need to pay attention when warnings are issued. If you take one lesson from it…that’s the one.
In the end, I think we’re looking at a solid stripes of EF-3 damage in between widespread EF-1/2. The radar presentation of this thing was as good as anything I’ve seen this spring, and hands down the most well developed supercell I’ve ever seen on radar in the Northeast, so it has the potential to be an EF-4 in a few spots… especially near where this radar image was taken. It was at its best (worst) I believe between Monson and Southbridge. But we’ll see. NWS Boston won’t have an official answer until tomorrow it appears.
Pick of the Weekend
Just trying something new here. My pick of the weekend is the Pacific Northwest. After months of rain and misery, at least a couple nice days are on top with 80s likely in Portland Saturday and upper 70s in Seattle as well into Sunday. As long as the dry, offshore flow develops as expected, it could be a chamber of commerce type weekend in the Northwest. Long overdue!
Doppler Radar Velocity Image Showing Astounding Gate to Gate Shear on the Greensburg Tornado (Courtesy: NWS I believe, click to enlarge)
A blog post by Mike Smith reminded me that tonight is the fourth anniversary of the EF-5 tornado that tore through Greensburg, KS. I thought I’d share some radar imagery I saved from the event. I was working on TV in Upstate NY at the time, and I remember watching this unfold that night. It gave me almost the exact same “pit in your stomach” feeling I had while watching the tornado outbreak ravage the Southeast last week. It was obvious from spotters and radar that a large and extremely dangerous tornado was on the ground in Kansas, and it was only a matter of time before it managed to run into a community on its path. Unfortunately that was Greensburg and unfortunately, that was at night. But because of the amazing warnings and preparedness of people in this part of the country, only eleven people lost their lives. It’s certainly 11 too many, but considering the circumstances, it had the potential to be even worse.
As a meteorologist, some particular events stand out to you…this one was one of them for me. I went home and watched coverage streaming online from KSN-TV for several hours that evening. Their chief meteorologist, Dave Freeman, did an absolutely remarkable job handling their station’s wall to wall coverage that evening. It was one of the few times I’ve ever said to myself that I need to write to someone to tell them what a spectacular job they did. Thankfully, that coverage is still online today:
Part One
Part Two
Some other imagery of that storm…
Radar Capture as Tornado Hit Greensburg, KSDoppler Velocity Image as Tornado Exits Greensburg, KS, with over 160 kts. gate to gate shear
Truly a remarkable night…one we’ll certainly experience again, but one I wish we would not have to witness again.
I’ve had this post brewing awhile, but I was inspired today by a friend’s photos on Facebook. I want to show you a couple cool radar images from the last couple weeks, from the Weather Underground weather website. Radar is obviously primarily used to track precipitation and thunderstorms. But, it can also be used to find hail cores in thunderstorms, areas of rotation in thunderstorms that may be producing tornadoes, rain/snow lines, areas of gusty winds, birds, and more!
Well, a couple recent examples of cool stuff you can see on radar.
Radar Loop from San Francisco Bay Area, credit: Weather Underground
If you click the map to the left, it will open up a radar loop from the San Francisco Bay Area that I caught a couple weeks ago. It was generally a quiet day, with just some showers offshore. But, if you look at the image, you’ll see a couple stationary areas, which, if you didn’t know better, you might assume are thunderstorms. Those areas are west of Modesto and south of Sacramento. Well, we know that it was a quiet morning, so it wasn’t a thunderstorm. So what’s going on?
Well, if you know about that area, there’s a gigantic wind farm in Altamont Pass. It’s the largest concentration of wind turbines in the world, with a capacity of 576 MW…through 4,900 turbines! So it’s huge. The other large wind farm there is north of that little lake: Shiloh Wind Power Plant. Smaller, with 300 MW of capacity and about 175 turbines. So what happens with radar in simple terms: The radar emits an electromagnetic beam, which will reflect off of objects and bounce bank to the radar, producing a pixel at the location where the beam bounced from. The radar almost always aims upward (so it doesn’t bounce off of ground level objects and can “look” into the clouds, where the rain/snow falls), so if there are any objects in the line of sight, they will reflect back a pixel. Given the location of the radar, just south of Sacramento, and assuming the line of sight is higher up…but not too terribly high (the radar beam was probably aimed low to look for patchy drizzle this morning), it’s obvious that the radar is picking up the turbines at those wind farms. The radar beam is hitting the rotating turbine, and firing back to the computer that “something” is there. That something is the wind turbine.
A lot of good, easy to understand information is here from the NWS Milwaukee, in a case study on their Butler Ridge wind farm.
More technical details are here…a website from the NWS explaining the issues with wind turbines and radar.
Example II
Radar loop from Fort Dix, NJ, zoomed in on Raritan Bay, credit: Weather Underground
This afternoon, there’s a fairly large brush fire burning near Edison, NJ. Well, in addition to picking up a lot of the other cool things I talked about above, radar can also detect smoke from large fires. If you look the image at right, you’ll see a great example of this happening…as the fire grows and the smoke plume rises, you can see it on radar. Essentially, the same process is at work. The radar beam is looking up into the clouds and instead of seeing a wind turbine, now it’s seeing (the many) particles contained within the smoke. We see this a lot.
Occasionally these fire plumes can put off enough heat to help clouds actually form above the fire, often in the smoke plume, called pyrocumulus clouds. These essentially are formed by the same process that forms thunderstorms, and like those, they can occasionally have lightning too. I do have a few photos from last year’s massive Station Fire near LA on Flickr here. More on that another time though.
So there’s some of the “fun” we can have with radar.
Hitting the Links
Here are some links I’ve encountered the last few days.
Ahead of the impending disaster likely from Tomas, Haiti is trying to get refugees from the earthquake as far out of harm’s way as is humanly possible. Tomas does not appear to be as big of a threat in terms of wind potential. However, it is equally as disheartening to watch as I warned you over the weekend from a rain potential. Tomas nearly fell apart this morning, as it was downgraded to a tropical depression. It has since restrengthened into a 45 mph tropical storm. The good news is that, as previously mentioned, everything got to this storm and it will likely NOT reintensify into a major storm. The bad news is that it’s still going for Haiti, and they should expect 5-10″ of rain, with upwards of 15″ possible in favorable upslope areas. Just a terrible situation. Stay tuned on this.
State of Occlusion 