Quote:
Originally Posted by Scott
It wasn't a tornado, it was nothing more than scud clouds. Their tendency to hang extremely low and move very rapidly leads to them being mistaken for funnel clouds pretty often.
I shot several pics and video of that storm and while its appearance was extremely menacing, it was harmless, other than the 40mph winds that quickly followed. There was no shortage of vertical motion, and at times plumes of water vapor did appear to stretch from ground to sky, but there was not a shred of rotation visible to the eye or in storm-relative radial velocity images from GYX.
The tornado warning that was issued for southeastern NH wasn't even related to the line of storms that passed through here. While the line of storms propagated to the southeast, individual cells, namely the one that hit us, actually pushed eastward into Maine.
|
May we see the pics and video? I didn't see it rotating, either, so I couldn't call it anything based on my own sight. But what to say to the many who did? My friend saw three "fingers" as she described them, dancing in a circle around each other. I know her to be sane, intelligent and drug-free. I have seen my share of scud clouds over the last 20 years and this one stood out to me. And why did the wind direction at my station blow directly toward the "scud" cloud the entire time it was passing? Storms don't normally do that here. We get straight-line from whatever direction they're coming from. This scud cloud acted as a magnet for surrounding air, the entire time it was passing.
This storm has caused me to doubt (more than before) what the radar really sees around here, because there apparently wasn't enough of an echo to warn my location about the severe thunderstorm until the worst of it was already passing. Before getting here, it had already done a good deal of damage, which I saw when I left to drive around afterwards. The lights went out about 5 minutes before the storm's arrival (when the wind was still calm here) and that was my cue to prepare for severe -- if I'd been depending solely on official warnings I'd now be retrieving my stuff from the lake, and/or recovering from injuries.
The radar doesn't catch everything around here. It's usually most obvious in winter when we're having moderate snow and the radar shows clear. I called in to GYX with a snow total one night last winter and whoever was on duty didn't know it was even snowing. I was shoveling it off the walkway.