F6: I was living in Georgetown, Texas when the Tornado in Jarrell Texas hit. Georgetown is about 25 miles south of Jarrell. I know some people that lost love one in it. My wife and stepdaughter help out after. My stepdaughters one time boy friend (Bubba) lost his mother in it, The town Jarrell got a lot of $$$ & help but people like Bubba didn't get shit for help. I was there the next day it did look like a war zone.
Lightning observed by the GOES-16 Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) illuminates the storms developing over southeast Texas on the morning of February 14, 2017, in this animation of GLM lightning events overlaid on Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) cloud imagery. Frequent lightning is occurring with the convective cells embedded in this severe weather system. The green cross indicates the location of Houston, and green dotted lines indicate the Texas coastline. This animation, rendered at 25 frames per second, simulates what your eye might see from above the clouds. GLM perceives the scene at 500 frames per second, and can distinguish the location, intensity and horizontal propagation of individual strokes within each lightning flash. Monitoring the flash rate from convective cells and their extent can help forecasters improve tornado and severe weather forecasts and warnings and their impending threat to the public. At the time of this animation, the storm cell in the center of the frame was reported by the NWS to have spawned one of a number of tornadoes and damaging winds spawned by the storm complex.
Credit: NOAA/NASA
Note: This is preliminary, non-operational data as GOES-16 undergoes on-orbit testing.
GOES-16 One-Minute Imagery of Severe Storms over Nebraska
Published on Mar 7, 2017 by NOAASatellites
On March 6, 2017, a potent weather system moved into the central plains and generated a plethora of dynamic weather, including high winds, large hail, and tornadoes, in addition to fanning a number of large grass fires. This 500-m resolution visible loop from GOES-16 shows the formation of the storms in eastern Nebraska just after 1 p.m. CST. The one-minute update frequency allows forecasters to track individual cumulus cloud formation and to see the up-down pulsing nature of the storms' overshooting tops. The first large hail report occurred just after 2 p.m. in eastern Nebraska and the first tornado at 5:30 pm near Harcourt, Iowa. Storms continued into the overnight hours in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, and produced at least 36 tornadoes and many high wind and large hail reports.
Credit: NOAA/NASA
Note: This is preliminary, non-operational data as GOES-16 undergoes on-orbit testing.
The first images from the Solar Ultraviolet Imager (SUVI) instrument aboard NOAA’s GOES-16 satellite captured a large coronal hole on the sun on January 29, 2017. The sun’s 11-year activity cycle is currently approaching solar minimum and during this time powerful solar flares become scarce and coronal holes become the primary space weather threat. Once operational, SUVI will capture full-disk solar images around-the-clock and will be able to see more of the environment around the sun than earlier NOAA geostationary satellites.
The sun’s upper atmosphere, or solar corona, consists of extremely hot plasma, an ionized gas. This plasma interacts with the sun’s powerful magnetic field, generating bright loops of material that can be heated to millions of degrees. Outside hot coronal loops, there are cool, dark regions called filaments which can erupt and become a key source of space weather when the sun is active. Other dark regions are called coronal holes, which occur where the sun’s magnetic field allows plasma to stream away from the sun at high speed, resulting in cooler areas. The effects linked to coronal holes are generally milder than those of coronal mass ejections, but when the outflow of solar particles in intense, they can still pose risks to Earth.
The solar corona is so hot that it is best observed with X-ray and extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) cameras. Various elements emit light at specific EUV and X-ray wavelengths depending on their temperature, so by observing in several different wavelengths, a picture of the complete temperature structure of the corona can be made. The GOES-16 SUVI observes the sun in six EUV channels.
SUVI will allow the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center to provide early space weather warnings to electric power companies, telecommunication providers and satellite operators. Depending on the size and the trajectory of solar eruptions, impacts to Earth can result in geomagnetic storms which disrupt power utilities, communication and navigation systems, and may cause radiation damage to orbiting satellites and the International Space Station.
Dust clouds sweep across north-central Texas in this 1-km GOES-16 composite color animation from 2030 to 2310 UTC on February 23, 2017.
As this animation suggests, the ability of GOES-16's Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) to provide such high-resolution imagery in color will be a boon to meteorologists as it will make it easier for them to identify different atmospheric or meteorological phenomena, such as dust from other types of clouds. As shown here, the brown-colored dust is easy to differentiate from smaller, white clouds mixed in with it.
Composite color images from GOES-16 are created by combining data from three of ABI's 16-bands -- band 1 (blue visible), band 2 (red visible) and band 3 (near-infrared vegetation) -- to produce a range of colors within visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum (think the colors of the rainbow, ROYGBIV).
Credit: NOAA/NASA
Note: This is preliminary, non-operational data as GOES-16 undergoes on-orbit testing.
GOES-16 vs. GOES-13 Shortwave Infrared of Grass Fires in Florida
Published on Feb 23, 2017 by NOAASatellites
This comparison of GOES-16 ABI and GOES-13 imager shortwave infrared (3.9 µm) data shows a number of grass fires burning near Lake Okeechobee in southern Florida on February 20, 2017. In the left panel, GOES-16 imagery at 30-second intervals is shown, while the right panel displays GOES-13 imagery at routine 15-30 minute intervals. The warmest shortwave infrared brightness temperatures are enhanced with yellow to red colors (with red being the hottest). Note the many advantages of the 30-second GOES-16 imagery: (1) new fire starts are detected sooner in time; (2) the fire behavior (intensification vs dissipation) can be better monitored; (3) the intensity of the fires is more accurately depicted with the 2-km resolution GOES-16 data vs the 8-km resolution GOES-13 data; (4) numerous brief fires are not detected at all in the 15-30 minute interval GOES-13 imagery (especially south and southeast of Lake Okeechobee, during the 2100-2115 UTC time period).
Credit: NOAA/NASA
Note: This is preliminary, non-operational data as GOES-16 undergoes on-orbit testing.
GOES-16 Rapid Scan Imagery of Severe Storms in Argentina
Published on Feb 22, 2017 by NOAASatellites
This incredible 30-second rapid-scan animation from GOES-16 demonstrates the very high spatial and temporal resolution from the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI). The rapid scan sector was set over north-central Argentina, which includes the city of Córdoba, where it captured some expected severe storms during an active late-summer weather pattern. This region is known to have some of the most extreme storms in the world.
The animation was created with the ABI band 2, its primary visible channel. Many interesting and important features of the near storm environment and convective clouds themselves are readily apparent. Differential motion between the developing thunderstorms and the low level clouds indicates the presence of converging low-level air leading to the rapid development of these storms. Apparent rotation in the boiling cloud tops suggests intense updrafts or vertical motion in these storms. Severe hail was reported with at least one of the storms in the center of the domain around 2130 UTC.
This movie provides a proof of concept for the RELAMPAGO (Spanish for “lightning”) field campaign. RELAMPAGO is an international project set for 2018-2019, whose goal is to study high impact weather and hydrometeorological extremes in central Argentina. It will also provide additional validation data sets to assess the ABI and Geostationary Lightning Mapper performance. Also of note is this data collection represents our first outside continental US test of the rapid scan capability of ABI on severe local storms.
Credit: NOAA/NASA
Note: This is preliminary, non-operational data as GOES-16 undergoes on-orbit testing.
GOES-16 Band 5 Imagery of Thunderstorms over the Texas Gulf Coast
Published on Feb 17, 2017 by NOAASatellites
This animation of GOES-16 rapid-scan near-infrared imagery shows the movement of thunderstorms over the Texas Gulf Coast on February 14, 2017. Note the clarity of the clouds, both liquid (brighter) and ice (darker), as well as the waves and shadows that can be seen in this loop.
This animation was created with the Advanced Baseline Imager's (ABI) band 5, which is often referred to as the "snow/ice band" because it will be used to assist with daytime cloud, snow, and ice discrimination among other tasks. Band 5 is one of the new spectral bands on GOES-16 that the previous GOES imagers do not have.
Rapid-scan imagery from GOES-16 will help forecasters monitor storms associated with severe weather as the spacecraft can capture one image of a storm every 30 seconds. This additional data, coupled with the increased resolution of the satellite's imager, will give meteorologists a better chance of seeing smaller details that less advanced satellite imagers could not detect.
Credit: NOAA/NASA
Note: This is preliminary, non-operational data as GOES-16 undergoes on-orbit testing.
NOAA's GOES-16 Sees Northeast Winter Storm Strengthen
Published on Feb 14, 2017 by NOAASatellites
Bombogenesis of northeast winter storm on February 13, 2017.
This water vapor imagery from GOES-16 shows the intensification of the winter storm that brought heavy snow to Maine and other areas of the Northeast yesterday, February 13, 2017.
According to NOAA's Weather Prediction Center, as the yesterday's winter storm in the Northeast moved off the coast and over the northwestern Atlantic, its surface pressure dropped from 996 hectopascals (hPA) at 11:00 am yesterday to 972 hPA at 10:30 pm, a drop of 24 hPA in 18.5 hours. (Note: A hectopascal (hPA) is a unit of pressure equal to a millibar.)
This rapid drop in barometric pressure is what meteorologists sometimes refer to as a "bomb," a term the NOAA Glossary defines as "the rapid intensification of a cyclone (aka: low pressure system) wherein the surface pressure falls by at least 24 millibars in a 24 hour period." (The term "bombogenesis" -- a combination of "bomb" and "cyclogenesis" -- which means the development of a cyclonic circulation) -- is sometimes used to describe these types of systems.
Credit: NOAA/NASA
Note: This is preliminary, non-operational data as GOES-16 undergoes on-orbit testing.
This water vapor imagery from February 9, 2017, shows the early stages of a developing winter storm along the East Coast as seen by both GOES-16 (left) and GOES-13 (right).
The current GOES imager only has one mid-level water vapor band, while the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) on GOES-16 has three. This allows ABI to capture water vapor features and atmospheric motion within more layers of the atmosphere, which helps numerical weather prediction models better depict of the current state of the atmosphere, and leads to better forecasts of storm development and movement.
For example, note the finer spatial resolution of ABI band (approximately 2 km) as compared to the imager aboard GOES-13 (approximately 4 km). The fine detail of small-scale mountain waves can be seen in the ABI data, but not in the current GOES images. Similarly, during the later portion of the animation, a post-cold-frontal trough can be seen offshore moving southward in the imagery from GOES-16, but not in the GOES-13 imagery. The faster processing afforded by ABI is also evident, with 5 minute imagery, versus 15 or 30 minute from the current GOES imager. More frequent imagery is important, as it allows for quicker detection of fast-developing convection and other phenomena.
Credit: NOAA/NASA
Note: This is preliminary, non-operational data as GOES-16 undergoes on-orbit testing.
Louisiana Tornadoes in all 16 Spectral Bands from GOES-16
Published on Feb 10, 2017 by NOAASatellites
What do we mean when we talk about the 16 spectral bands offered by GOES-16's Advanced Baseline Imager? This animation of the severe storm system that produced tornadoes in southeastern Louisiana on February 7, 2017, shows ABI's 2 visible, 4 near-infrared and 10 infrared spectral bands in time sequence. Monitoring the weather in different wavelengths allows meteorologists to better analyze different layers of the atmosphere, distinguish between cloud types and other phenomena and generally see the Earth's atmosphere and surface in greater, more vivid detail. For example, ABI band 5 (also known as the Snow/ice near infrared band), which is new to GOES satellites, will help meteorologists distinguish glaciated or ice clouds from other cloud types.
Credit: NOAA/NASA
Note: This is preliminary, non-operational data as GOES-16 undergoes on-orbit testing.
A strong coastal winter storm brought heavy snow and strong winds to portions of the northern Middle Atlantic through northern New England on February 9, 2017. The development and path of this intense storm can be seen in this water vapor imagery from GOES-16. Of particular interest in this animation is the improved spatial resolution compared to current GOES. The satellite's Advanced Baseline Imager offers 16 spectral bands, three of which are water vapor bands -- this imagery was created with band 10. These additional water vapor bands enable meteorologists to see further down into the mid-troposphere in clear sky regions compared to the current GOES water vapor band. It also allows them better characterize the total amount of moisture in the atmosphere that can turn into rain and snow.
Credit: NOAA/NASA
Note: This is preliminary, non-operational data as GOES-16 undergoes on-orbit testing.
GOES-16 and GOES-13 Comparison of Punch Cloud Over North Carolina
Published on Feb 9, 2017 by NOAASatellites
“Punch” or “hole streak” clouds are formed when part of a liquid water cloud glaciates, most likely due to interactions with an airplane. These clouds can be seen in this animation showing the sky over northern North Carolina on February 1, 2017. The visible imagery on the top half is from ABI aboard the recently launched GOES-16, while the visible imagery on the bottom is from the imager aboard GOES-13 (aka: GOES East).
Credit: NOAA/NASA
Note: This is preliminary, non-operational data as GOES-16 undergoes on-orbit testing.
GOES-16 Sees Tornadic Storms in Louisiana on February 7, 2017
Published on Feb 8, 2017 by NOAASatellites
This visible animation from GOES-16 shows the tornadic storms that swept through Louisiana yesterday, February 7, 2017. According to several news outlets, Louisiana remains in a state of emergency after the storms destroyed homes and businesses, disrupted power, and injured dozens of people in the southeastern part of the state.
As this imagery illustrates, the high-resolution offered by GOES-16's Advanced Baseline Imager will allow forecasters to see meteorological phenomena in vivid detail. For example, in this loop, note how the top of the tornadic storm can be seen passing along the southern coast of Lake Pontchartrain.
Credit: NOAA/NASA
Note: This is preliminary, non-operational data as GOES-16 undergoes on-orbit testing.
The animation of full disk images shows the continental United States in the two visible, four near-infrared and 10 infrared channels on ABI. These channels help forecasters distinguish between differences in the atmosphere like clouds, water vapor, smoke, ice and volcanic ash. GOES-16 has three-times more spectral channels than earlier generations of GOES satellites.
Credit: NOAA/NASA
The GOES-16 data posted on this page are preliminary, non-operational data and are undergoing on-orbit testing.
This composite color full-disk visible animation is from 1:07 p.m. EDT on January 15, 2017 and was created using several of the 16 spectral channels available on the GOES-16 Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) instrument. Seen here are North and South America and the surrounding oceans.
GOES-16 observes Earth from an equatorial view approximately 22,300 miles high, creating full disk images like these, extending from the coast of West Africa, to Guam, and everything in between.
Credit: NOAA/NASA
The GOES-16 data posted on this page are preliminary, non-operational data and are undergoing on-orbit testing.
International Cloud Atlas Recognizes 11 New Kinds Of Clouds Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a volutus giant sky roll! Asperitas clouds look like a rough, rolling sea [have seen, together with the cavum just below, as part of an organizing severe event]. Another newly recognized cloud formation: cavum, which looks like a hole punched into the sky [have also seen, together with the asperitas just above, as part of an organizing severe event]. 03/24/2017 Updated March 24, 2017 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/international-atlas-new-clouds_us_58d48f21e4b02a2eaab23a14
Four devastating tornadoes hit Moore, Oklahoma, in 16 years. Was it geography or just bad luck?
By Maggie Koerth-Baker May 26, 2016 at 7:00 AM
On the evening of May 3, 1999, a massive tornado tore through the Oklahoma City area. Known today as the Bridge Creek-Moore Tornado [ http://www.srh.noaa.gov/oun/?n=events-19990503-f5tornado ], it’s infamous for its size (a mile wide) and strength (wind speeds reached 300 miles per hour, on par with a Tokyo bullet train). It moved, as tornadoes so often do, from the southwest to the northeast, touching down in the rural plains before churning its way through the suburb of Moore and up to Midwest City, just east of downtown — which was where it pulverized my dad’s truck.
My dad, Howard Koerth, moved to Oklahoma in 1994 to teach art at Rose State Community College in Midwest City. He was there May 3, right in the tornado’s path. Instead of going to the storm shelter, he opened the back door of his building and watched the fat funnel tear apart an auto dealership. The tornado was gray, tinted with red from the layers of clay-filled topsoil it had peeled off the Earth. If you watch video of it today, you see it surrounded by a haze of confetti. When the camera zooms in, the ticker tape turns out to be, instead, a blizzard of two-by-fours, siding, whole trucks. Sixteen years later, Dad has yet to exorcise that image from his mind and he’s still asking me about the Bridge Creek-Moore tornado. Or, rather, he asks me about its sister storms — tornadoes that, to him, seem to follow the same path, flattening the same places over and over. Especially Moore. Always Moore.
He called me in 2003, when a slightly less powerful tornado — and, by “less powerful,” I mean one classified as “devastating” (an EF4) rather than “incredible” (an EF5) — hit Moore. He called me in 2010, when another EF4 struck the town. He called me in 2013, when Moore was hit — improbably — by a second EF5. He always asks the same question: “What is going on here?” One town. Sixteen years. Four big, powerful tornadoes. It’s a hell of a coincidence. Can it really be just the work of random chance?
Nobody knows how likely it is that a given town would be hit by four violent tornadoes in 16 years; if we knew that, then we’d also know whether Moore really is especially tornado prone, or just suffering a streak of bad luck. But we do know big tornadoes, themselves, are rare. Devastating EF4s made up 1.37 percent of all the tornadoes that hit the U.S. from 1994 to 2012 [ http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/9/2/024018/pdf ]. Just 0.14 percent were incredible EF5s.
And that’s enough to make Moore’s recent history turn heads. People who live in the Plains states, as I once did, have a special relationship with tornadoes, wary but familiar, like your grandma’s dog that’ll bite if you aren’t careful. This is a part of the country where little kids dream about growing up to be storm chasers. Where tornado sirens go off every Wednesday at lunchtime, just as a test of the system. It’s a part of the country where art professors like my dad duck outside for a peek at one of the most powerful tornadoes in recorded history.
But this thing with Moore even weirds out Oklahomans. “For years people have asked me, ‘What about Moore?’ ” said Gary England, a retired TV meteorologist who shepherded generations of Oklahomans through more than 40 tornado seasons. “People talk about topography. They talk about geomagnetic forces. I think it’s very unusual. But I think most scientists would probably tell you it’s just a roll of the dice.”
[note: incorrectly labeled; shows only some of the longer-tracked tornadoes rated F3/EF3 or higher for the designated period]
* * *
The first big tornado recorded in Oklahoma happened on April 25, 1893. Witnesses claimed it was more than a mile wide. It hit Moore, which had just been incorporated that same year. Yes, one of the first things that happened in the town was the destruction of the town.
But that still doesn’t mean that a tornado in Moore is anything more than a roll of the dice, as England put it. Even Grazulis, who was surprised by what had happened to Moore recently, thinks the events of the last 16 years reek of random clustering. That’s because, all things considered, it’s no big surprise that a place in central Oklahoma is being hit by a lot of tornadoes. There’s a mystery about the risks associated with Moore, but it’s a mystery that’s complicated by matters of scale. If you zoom out — look at our hemisphere or our continent — the part of the country Moore is in really is more likely to be hit by tornadoes than most other places, that’s not random. But the fact that Moore, specifically, is being hit over and over … that could still just be bad luck.
To understand why, you need to know a little about how tornadoes work [ http://www.spc.noaa.gov/faq/tornado/ ]. All tornadoes that touch down in central Oklahoma start their lives in two places: the Gulf of Mexico and the Rocky Mountains. Warm, moist air comes up from the Gulf in the south. From the west, air ripples over the mountaintops, losing moisture and heat as it goes. This odd couple meets on the downward slope into the plains. The air currents from the south tend to be at a lower level of the atmosphere than those from the west, which creates an opportunity for naturally buoyant, hot, moist air to rise up through layers of cool, dry air. That produces condensation, just like water droplets form on the outside of a cold can of soda on a hot day. Now you have the ingredients of a thunderstorm: moisture, rising air currents, and the instability that happens when Gulf air and the mountain air jockey for position.
This is why the infamous Tornado Alley of the Plains states is Tornado Alley. It’s the place where the Gulf air and the mountain air meet. “The central part of the U.S. is incredibly well designed to produce tornadoes,” said Harold Brooks, senior scientist at the National Severe Storms Weather Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma — a suburb just south of Moore. There are a few other places on Earth with similar profiles, but they have limitations the Plains states just don’t have, such as a mountain range like the Andes, which is thinner and can’t dry or cool air as well as the Rockies. The central U.S. is the most likely place for tornadoes to form, on this continent and anywhere in the world. Insomuch as it sits right in the middle of that, yes, Moore is at a higher risk.
But that’s Moore in comparison to Cleveland or Buenos Aires. What about at the smaller scale: Moore in comparison to, say, Tulsa? That’s a question that hasn’t been explored as much as the science of tornadoes themselves. Researchers at the National Severe Storms Laboratory say there isn’t much emphasis placed on the question of whether a specific region or town might be more prone to tornado activity than another. Instead, they’re more interested in how the storms form, how to track them and how to get more accurate warnings out faster.
There are three big problems. First, tornadoes are really complex systems. They only form if a storm begins to rotate vertically [ http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/severeweather/resources/ttl6-10.pdf ], a corkscrew of air rising high into the sky. Scientists think that rotation starts because of wind shear, quick changes in wind speed or direction at different levels of the atmosphere. Imagine holding a piece of Play-Doh between your flattened hands. If you move them past each other, in opposite directions, the dough in between rolls up into a tube. Similarly, wind shear creates horizontal columns of spinning air. When those get caught by rising warm air, they can tip up, become vertical, and turn a thunderstorm into a supercell. A tornado happens when that spinning supercell touches the ground.
Each of the steps in the storm’s formation – from the meeting of the Gulf and mountain air currents, to the moment the supercell stretches down and scrapes its fingers through the dirt – involves forces scientists don’t totally understand and elements of random chance. Add it all together and you have a dark, churning mass of mystery and probability.
For Gregory Carbin, that reality sank in as he watched the Bridge Creek-Moore tornado. From Carbin’s vantage point, just outside the Severe Storms Laboratory, the tornado itself wasn’t visible, but the supercell was. It rose up, black and boiling, a chimney belching angry water vapor 50,000 feet into the air. And Carbin thought, “It’s so fragile.”
“It occurred to me that, you know, what would it take for it to just be a rain shower or nothing at all? Everything needs to come together just right, and if you don’t have those conditions, if something is off — and we don’t even know what that something might be — you don’t get a tornado,” he said.
The second problem is that tornadoes are pretty rare. One thousand a year, scattered across the continent, does not produce many data points at the scale of an individual city. Most days, there aren’t tornadoes anywhere. That problem is exacerbated by the third issue: Scientists really only have about 50 years of really good tornado documentation. Essentially, Brooks told me, scientists can’t tell us whether what’s happened in Moore is abnormal because they don’t know what a “normal” amount of violent tornadoes is. With all of that, Brooks said, there’s not a good way to clearly tell the difference between patterns and pareidolia [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia ]. After all, the human brain is primed to find significance in the random. In the creaky corners of our neural pathways, a jumble of rocks can become an old man, a coat hanger can become a drunk octopus [ https://www.pinterest.com/dannybirchall/drunk-octopus-wants-to-fight-you/ ], a bunch of craters on the moon give us a friendly smile. It’s so easy for a few random events to make one small town look like a tornado magnet. It would be harder not to see it.
* * *
And Moore, itself, facilitates that pareidolia. Located about 11 miles due south of downtown Oklahoma City, Moore is a town for which Interstate 35 serves as a virtual Main Street, running through the middle of town. Businesses cluster on either side: A movie theater, Hollie’s Flatiron Steakhouse, Furr’s Fresh Buffet, the skating rink, Leon’s Pharmacy. Even the public library, community center and the Chamber of Commerce abut the frontage roads.
The town may have been incorporated in 1893, but until suburbia dropped out of the sky and landed on it, Moore was so small that there was no real historic center to anchor businesses to. Stretching away from the highway, on either side, streets of tidy, middle-class homes wind around parks and curve into cul-de-sacs. Many have brick facades and a stubby look, hugging the ground like Corgis. It took me a minute to realize that this was because the construction is almost uniformly slab on grade. Central Oklahoma is tornado prone, and the National Weather Service recommends basements and storm cellars [ http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/severeweather/prepare.shtml ] as first-line tornado shelters. But few buildings in central Oklahoma are built with either one [ http://ensia.com/voices/the-culture-of-disaster/ ].
Like many places with this kind of history, Moore is somewhat amorphous, its 22 square miles [ http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/4049200 ] bleeding into Oklahoma City to the north and the more well-known (and well-off) college town of Norman to the south. It’s easy for even longtime residents to be unsure of where their city ends and another begins. The official size is misleading in other ways, as well. That’s because Moore’s school district is 159 square miles [ http://www.mooreschools.com/site/default.aspx?PageID=1 ], encompassing parts of the southern end of OKC, itself. The result is a colloquial Moore that is much larger than what the census might tell you. “The largest high school in Oklahoma City is Westmoore High School. So people think of all that southwestern Oklahoma City as being Moore,” Brooks said.
“Which, had I been in my right mind, we would have stayed put and would have been fine,” Fox said. “What we ended up doing, we drove into the path of this smaller spin-off and we had to pull out of traffic into a church parking lot. As we’re pulling off, trees are coming out, roots are coming up, rain is going sideways, my kids are crying and screaming. We end up arriving at this church with 20 other people who have come from different directions to get here. The inner doors are locked. We’re in a vestibule. And this guy whips out a crowbar from his truck.”
Fox, who went on to found a community volunteer organization called Serve Moore, survived his brush with both the fury of nature and breaking and entering. But the tornadoes he and his family were fleeing never hit the place they were fleeing from. According to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, those tornadoes touched down in El Reno, southwest Oklahoma City and other suburbs … but not Moore.
Moore’s tornado problem exists both as data and as mythology. There are the tornadoes that hit Moore and then there’s the pervasive sense that Moore gets hit by tornadoes.
Consider the suburb of Norman, which sits just to the south of Moore. It’s the next set of exits off I-35. Patrick Marsh, of the Severe Storms Weather Laboratory, told me initially that Moore had been hit by more tornadoes in recent years than Norman. But, as we continued talking, he went through that recent tornado history and ended up stopping and correcting himself. Actually, Norman probably had been hit about as frequently as Moore, he said. It’s just that Norman had avoided the big EF4s and EF5s that everybody remembered, and so Norman hadn’t taken on the status of being tornado prone. “I don’t think you can statistically prove that your risk is any lower than what happened two miles up the road in Moore,” he said. “But everybody in Norman thinks, ‘Oh, I’m safe. Because the tornado will hit Moore.’ ”
Between the large-scale likelihood of tornadoes, the pareidolia and the self-mythologizing, I was ready to believe that the Moore mystery wasn’t really that mysterious. Bad luck and supposition seemed to account for everything. That’s certainly the sense you get from a cursory glance at the historical data. Harold Brooks showed me a map of Oklahoma City sprinkled with multicolored tracks of all the tornadoes that had gone through the area since 1880. There’s no obvious confluence over Moore. The whole region is littered with tornado tracks. Bethany, a town on Oklahoma City’s northwest side, has been hit seven times since 1930. On the map view, it looks about as beleaguered as Moore. Meanwhile, there’s a chunk of northeast Moore that’s never been hit, at all.
But then Brooks brought out one more data set. In the late 1990s, he’d been a part of an effort to quantify what was normal and what wasn’t about the distribution of tornadoes. As I already mentioned, this is difficult work and it’s made even more complex by fudging and inconsistencies in the historical documentation.
National Weather Service records go back to 1950. Tom Grazulis’ data set, which is based on newspaper accounts and records kept by local postmasters, picks up the trail back to the 1600s, and Brooks considers it reliable to about 1870. But both of those are likely missing a lot of smaller tornadoes and tornadoes that landed in lightly populated places. Perspective matters. In 1880 a mapmaker promoting colonization of the Oklahoma Territory claimed the area was virtually tornado free, Grazulis told me. Even when these records don’t miss a tornado, they have clearly been fudged in many ways. It’s unlikely, as Brooks pointed out, that so many tornadoes would start punctually at the top of the hour, the way they tend to in the historical records.
But these records can still tell us something useful about the statistical probability of a tornado’s touching down in one place and not in another. At the very least, it tells you what is possible. Brooks analyzed the data to find the times of the year and places in the country where tornadoes seemed to be more likely to happen. It wasn’t exactly a prediction of the future – more a detailed observation of the past. Using this, he came up with the most likely place and time for a big tornado: a town called Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, on May 2.
“So, has a tornado ever hit Pauls Valley on May 2?” I asked him.
“No. I don’t think so,” he said.
But when I laughed, he explained. That location comes with a caveat. It’s got some built-in margin of error to make up for all the poorly collected reports and missed tornadoes of decades past. Scientists call this smoothing the data, and Brooks’ estimate is smoothed to within 50 miles or so.
Moore is 46 miles north of Pauls Valley.
Brooks presented this data at a conference on April 30, 1999. Three days later, the Bridge Creek-Moore tornado came to town. “In some sense,” he said, “That tornado on May 3 was about as likely of a violent tornado as you could imagine.”
* * *
Michael Bewley was 11 years old in 1999, when the Bridge Creek-Moore tornado flattened the house he shared with his mother on the outskirts of Moore. One day, they had a small, neat home on three acres at the end of a long dirt road. The next day, they had rubble.
Bewley and his mother had no basement. They could have crawled into the bathtub, pulled a mattress over themselves, and hoped for the best. Instead, they ran for the car. “She was a waitress and she grabbed her time cards, I grabbed the dog, and we left,” he told me. When they came back later that night, everything was gone. Their belongings had been crushed, thrown and rained on. Bewley is certain they wouldn’t have survived if they’d stayed.
But, in one sense, he did stay. Bewley still lives in Moore. Today he manages Chris Fox’s Serve Moore foundation. Bewley has an infant daughter whom he plans to raise in Moore and who has already taken her first turns in the storm shelter. These are the realities of his life: Has it been shaped by chance, or something else?
We can’t completely discount the possibility of something else. In 2004, Brooks’ colleagues Chris Broyles and Casey Crosbie published a paper [ http://www.spc.noaa.gov/publications/broyles/longtrak.pdf ] that analyzed the locations of all the EF3, EF4 and EF5 tornadoes that touched down between 1880 and 2003. They focused on these three classes of tornado because that filters out the smaller type of tornadoes that more easily get left out of records. By smoothing the data in this way, the researchers saw some places where larger tornadoes really do seem to be more common.
Looking at it this way is looking at tornadoes on a zoomed-in scale, regional instead of national. At this level, Moore still isn’t unique. But it is part of a clique — a gang of cities and counties marked by the invisible target painted on their backs. Broyles and Crosbie drew a frequency map of the 979 big tornadoes to touch down in 123 years, showing the number of tornadoes per 1,000 square miles. Plotted out this way, they found clusters. There are dark blobs – tornado alleys within tornado alleys – scattered across the continent. One of those blobs sits over central Oklahoma, north of the Canadian River, stretching from Oklahoma City to Tulsa. Moore is a part of that blob. Other places, including Fillmore County, Nebraska, and Union County, Mississippi, appear to be even more prone to big tornadoes.
America’s mini-tornado alleys, as identified by Chris Broyles and Casey Crosbie of the Storm Prediction Center. This map is reprinted from their 2004 paper. Moore is part of the handgun-shaped blob hovering over central Oklahoma [full study http://www.spc.noaa.gov/publications/broyles/longtrak.pdf ]. Courtesy of Chris Broyles.
This study wasn’t perfect. For one thing, Brooks said, it’s probably no coincidence that the highest frequencies were east of the Mississippi River – where the population density, even in rural areas, is higher than in Oklahoma and other Plains states. That higher population density probably means more thorough reporting of tornadoes. It’s also possible that there are differences between locations in how tornado damage is recorded — and, thus, in how the tornadoes, which are classed based on the damage they cause, get counted.
Recently, a Severe Storms Laboratory research scientist named Corey Potvin teamed up with Brooks and Broyles to re-evaluate the mini-tornado alleys data. They tested out some new ways of accounting for flaws in historical records and calculated the probability that these mini-alleys occurred randomly was just 3 percent. In October of 2015, they presented the results as a poster [ http://www.nwas.org/meetings/nwas15/abstracts-html/2665.html (currently brings up a 404 "page not found")] at the National Weather Association Annual Meeting. Their conclusion: “At least some of the mini-tornado alleys likely are real.” Potvin now thinks that may be a bit premature to say and there are a lot of caveats that go with it, but he is confident they aren’t just a relic of the sampling: garbage data produced by flaws in the way the tornadoes were documented and categorized. What’s happened in Moore is shaped by chance — but it’s also, probably, more than that.
* * *
Unfortunately, this is where tornado science dusts its hands and wanders off for a beer. Meteorology can tell us about how tornadoes form at the continental scale. Detailed study of the historical records can tell us about regional probabilities. But when you get to the hyper-local level — the real question of, what is up with Moore? — scientists go mute.
Luckily, we have insurance agents. (If anybody would know about the risks of natural disasters, it’s the insurance industry, right?) And from their perspective, Moore just isn’t that special. People who live in Moore don’t pay any more in home insurance premiums than people in nearby communities around OKC and central Oklahoma, said Robert Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute. Frankly, he told me, insurers are more concerned about the thunderstorm that moves across the whole state than they are about the tornado that drops from it to wreck part of a county or two. Oklahomans have the fourth-highest property insurance premiums in the nation, and much of that is tied up in risks that might be tornado related, but aren’t tornado specific, such as hail, straight-line winds, tree branches crashing through the roof.
That’s because, unlike a hurricane, which can flatten property for hundreds of miles, tornadoes are a more discrete threat. The Bridge Creek-Moore tornado left a mile-wide path of complete destruction, but houses a few blocks away went untouched. Most people who got hit by that tornado haven’t been hit by any of the others. Parts of Moore have never been hit, at all. If hurricanes are nature’s nuclear warhead, tornadoes are its smart bomb. That difference impacts individual risk. And so the hurricane-prone states of Florida, Louisiana and Texas come before Oklahoma on the list of states with the highest premiums.
Knowing that, it becomes less surprising to learn that during the 16 years when Moore has been earning its reputation as America’s tornado magnet, it’s also been growing like gangbusters. A 2014 Census Bureau report showed a 41.3 percent increase in population between 2000 and 2013. “Our growth rate is higher than the state average and is typically one of the highest of the larger cities in Oklahoma,” said Deidre Ebrey, Moore’s director of economic development. That’s not because of the tornadoes. (If anything, it’s probably because of Oklahoma’s oil and gas boom.) But if you’re looking for a place to live near OKC, you could do worse than Moore. As many people who live there told me — the cost of living is low, the schools are good, the commutes are short. And you probably aren’t any more likely to be hit by a tornado than you are in a neighboring suburb.
Even if evidence comes along someday to prove that there really is something that draws tornadoes to Moore, specifically, that might not really matter all that much to the individual risk of the people who live there. Scale matters. And it contributes to the difficulty of figuring out why tornadoes strike some places and not others. To ask “why,” you first have to know “whether.” And whether tornado hot spots happen or not is relative. “Moore is a mystery, and you aren’t going to get an explanation,” Grazulis told me.
If that’s where we have to leave it … well, it wouldn’t be the first time tornadoes have led people on a bit of a wild goose chase. Take the case of Codell, Kansas [ https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/tornadoes/12223 ]. On May 20, 1916, Codell was hit by a tornado. It was hit again on May 20, 1917. On May 20, 1918, a third tornado tore through town. Yes, really. You can find the records with the Kansas State Historical Society. Was there something special about Codell? Maybe. And then again, maybe not.
“What I really would like to know is what it was like on May 20, 1919,” Brooks said. “That’s the story I want. But we don’t really know much. I guess the 1918 tornado just sort of ended the town.”
And after that, Codell, or what was left of it, was never hit by a tornado again.
The United States Weather Bureau explains how tornado's form, how the weather bureau predicts tornado's, and the warnings issued to the general population.
Made possible as a public service by University of California Extension Media Center, United Gas Corporation, and Texas Eastern Transmission Corporation. Cooperation of WKY-TV, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and Southwestern Bell Telephone Company.
S88TV1 - Transport, technology, and general interest movies from the past - newsreels, documentaries & publicity films from my archives.
This is part one of two of the tornado safety film "Tornado!" which was made in 1967. This film contains several vintage tornadoes. It also includes outdated information/safety tips in regards to tornadoes.
*UPDATED*
I'm going to attempt to identify which tornadoes are used in this video. Some of the tornadoes I don't know at all and will mark them with four question marks (????). Some of the tornadoes I'm not 100% sure about and will list what tornado I think it is but will place two question marks at the end (??). If anybody knows which tornadoes these are or if I labeled any of the tornadoes wrong please inform me so I can correct/update it.
0:00-0:25 Perrin AFB, TX 4/18/1957 (Thanks Anticyclonic for identifying this) 0:26-0:28 Scottsbluff, NE 6/27/1955 ?? 0:29-0:31 Perrin AFB, TX 4/18/1957 0:31-0:33 Scottsbluff, NE 6/27/1955 ?? 0:34-0:36 Dallas, TX 4/2/1957 ?? 1:35-1:39 ???? 1:39-1:47 Dallas, TX 4/2/1957 (Thanks to hfkjehgufihgiufewi for confirming this) 1:47-1:51 Topeka, KS 6/8/1966 (Thanks to kevin120857 for confirming this)
This is part two of two of the tornado safety film "Tornado!" which was made in 1967. This film contains several vintage tornadoes. It also includes outdated information/safety tips in regards to tornadoes.
I'm going to attempt to identify which tornadoes are used in this video. Some of the tornadoes I don't know at all and will mark them with four question marks (????). Some of the tornadoes I'm not 100% sure about and will list what tornado I think it is but will place two question marks at the end (??). If anybody knows which tornadoes these are or if I labeled any of the tornadoes wrong please inform me so I can correct/update it.
2:12-2:14 Perrin AFB, TX 4/18/1957 (Thanks cbehr91 for identifying it) 2:21-2:23 Dallas, TX 4/2/1957 ?? 2:56-3:01 Topeka, KS 6/8/1966 3:09-3:11 Topeka, KS 6/8/1966 3:18-3:21 Scottsbluff, NE 6/27/1955 3:40-3:43 Scottsbluff, NE 6/27/1955 4:15-4:23 Scottsbluff, NE 6/27/1955 4:26-4:33 Scottsbluff, NE 6/27/1955 4:38-4:48 Scottsbluff, NE 6/27/1955 4:54-5:00 Scottsbluff, NE 6/27/1955 5:04-5:22 Scottsbluff, NE 6/27/1955
Reenactment for a Civil Defense Promotion Film released in 1978 to inspire communities to implement early warning systems. Actual community members from the locality participated as themselves, as the actors, in the scenes. It is assembled with news reels from local and national press, such as those found in AP News Reels, as well as local channels like in Dayton, OH. Parts that include the Xenia Tornado starts at approximately 10 minutes in. This film covered multiple states from Alabama to Ohio. It was released in 1978 and the subject content is about 1974.
The film was transferred from 16 MM Film in 1987 to 1" video tape from a Film Chain at Channel 22 in Dayton, OH. The master tape is stored in our archives and is of interest to me because it is where I grew up and for historical and public interest purposes. Because the film chain equipment used slide technology at the time, and one slide that had been used so much it had burned into the monitor that that used as the screen. Therefore, in some shots, you can see the 22 image burned (superposed) into the center of the image.
April, 1994 WDTN production, "Funnel of Fury" broadcast for the 20th anniversary of the 1974 Xenia, Ohio Tornado. Carl Day, Carl Nichols, Brian Davis, & Chris Bradley report.
Day of Destruction WHIO 1994 Broadcast for the 20th Anniversary of the Xenia Tornado
Published on Apr 6, 2016 by L Hellmund
WHIO Channel 7 1994 Broadcast, "Day of Destruction", the 20th Anniversary of the Xenia, Ohio Tornado. Cheryl McHenry, Ken Jefferson, Jim Baldridge, Natasha King, Heidi Sonen, Warren Madden, Sallie Taylor, Dr. Sherry Stanley, Shawn Ley.
A documentary on the super tornado outbreak of April 3, 1974, which claimed six lives in Lincoln County and destroyed homes and farms here, will be aired in the coming days.
"A Night of Stark Terror" is a collaborative effort of The National Weather Service, Fayetteville Public Utilities and The Elk Valley Times.
"The 40th anniversary of the April 3, 1974 super tornado outbreak occurred on Thursday, April 3rd," said Tim Troutman with the National Weather Service, who has helped spearhead the documentary project. "The National Weather Service has collaborated with Fayetteville Public Utilities and The Elk Valley Times to produce a documentary that will remember and re-visit the super tornado outbreak and how it affected Lincoln county residents.
"It is hoped that this documentary and other related April 3, 1974 web page information located at http://www.srh.noaa.gov/hun/?nhunsur_... will serve as a remembrance to the ones that were lost in the tornado outbreak, further documenting the event and also serve as a reminder to residents that we are in a severe weather active region," Troutman said.
The documentary was aired on local FPU channel 6, the FPU web site and The Times' website, www.elkvalleytimes.com, and will include several interviews, testimonials and footage of historic pictures and video from the April 3, 1974 super tornado outbreak. Viewers will hear from eyewitnesses to the day of terror, including Donna Gill, Bobby and Joyce Plunkett, Donnie Ogle, members of the Caldwell family, Joe Tom Hudson, Harv Edwards, the Gardner family and Jeff Walker.
"I have read there were 148 tornadoes, and seven were F-5's," said Britt Dye, CEO and general manager of FPU. "Thirteen states were hit on the 3rd and 4th of April, 1974. 2,014 miles were covered by the tornadoes. FPU became a StormReady Supporter in 2008. Working with the National Weather Service as part of the StormReady Program shows our commitment to being prepared as best we can for extreme weather conditions.
"I would like to thank The Elk Valley Times and The National Weather Service for giving us this great opportunity to be a part of documenting the tornadoes of 1974," Dye added. "The historic documentary will be aired beginning on Friday, April 11, and Saturday, April 12, beginning at 7:30 p.m. We would also like to thank the victims of the 1974 tornado for allowing us to come in their homes to video and go through their pictures to relive their painful stories."
"A special thanks is extended to The Times' readers who responded to our call for photos from the super tornado outbreak," said Sandy Williams, The Times' news editor. "The photos our readers shared, which are included in the documentary, show the devastation left in the wake of that deadly storm and remind us that it truly was a day of terror for our community and those impacted by the storms.
"Thanks, too, to Tim Troutman with the National Weather Service and Don Counts and Gina Warren with FPU for their hard work on this project. They have spent many hours on the documentary to make sure that it is informative and honors the memory of those lost as a result of the storm."
A compilation released in the mid-1990's in response to the movie Twister. Main topics include storm chasing and the science behind Tornadoes.
Note: Much of the footage shown can also be seen in the Tornado Video Classics uploads on my channel.
Twisters! Nature's Fury (1996) Join storm chasers, scientists and video camera amateurs as they film the fury of tornadoes. In the first part of the video, it features scientists using "Project Vortex" as they place instruments around the twisters to record data and following storm chasers with their best video sequences on the dangerous cyclones. In part two, watch as amateurs capture video sequences and witness the damage after the storm is over. It also features a countdown of the top ten most destructive video sequences. Director: Thomas P. Grazulis Writer: Thomas P. Grazulis Star: David Ross http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1935295/
Twisters: Nature's Deadly Force Initial release: 1996 Director: Steve Sembritzky Cast: Jeff Piotrowski, Jim Giles This amazing footage has been captured on video from across the U.S., and features incredible scenes from Emmy Award winning photographer, Jeff Piotrowski, a professional storm chaser. According to Tom Grazulis, author of "Significant Tornadoes" – which has become the storm chaser's bible, Jeff holds two positions on the Top 20 Tornado Video Countdown, and has acknowledged that Jeff has been on 14 of the Top 20 tornado chases in recent history. You will see footage from Project VORTEX, the group of scientist portrayed in the motion picture "Twister." You will experience the adrenaline pumping excitement of actual storm chasers … watching killer Tornadoes from their very inception. You will also witness other examples of Mother Natures' most severe weather phenomena develop right before your very eyes. We will also visit with professional meteorologists at the National Weather Service to see first hand how they predict and track severe weather. And perhaps more importantly – you will be given tips on how to survive in case you are ever caught in a Twister's path! http://www.vcientertainment.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=410
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