Hoosier Posted March 18, 2012 Share Posted March 18, 2012 Today is the anniversary so I thought I'd share this page from NWS Paducah. There are several links at the bottom. http://www.crh.noaa.gov/pah/?n=1925_tor_tt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andyhb Posted March 18, 2012 Share Posted March 18, 2012 Yup, on the day of my birthday... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Indystorm Posted March 18, 2012 Share Posted March 18, 2012 Yup, on the day of my birthday... Still a most unbelievable storm with probably the entire wall cloud on the ground for quite the length of path. Think Joplin over many more miles. And have a good birthday. Keep us up to date in the Central/West forum on svr storms in TX, OK, and KS this Sunday evening. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
knitwx Posted March 18, 2012 Share Posted March 18, 2012 Yup, on the day of my birthday... Happy birthday. Do you think the tornado was one single funnel or a cycling supercell? The path is said to have been without breaks. Do you think modern technology would have found some? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andyhb Posted March 18, 2012 Share Posted March 18, 2012 Still a most unbelievable storm with probably the entire wall cloud on the ground for quite the length of path. Think Joplin over many more miles. And have a good birthday. Keep us up to date in the Central/West forum on svr storms in TX, OK, and KS this Sunday evening. Cheers, and I'll do my best. And that it was moving extremely quickly too, not like some of the other slower moving violent tornadoes which have time to grind on their targets (Jarrell, etc.) and produced damage I would say is worse than most of them, particularly in IL. I would love to see a radar loop of this thing had it existed back then, and obviously pictures of the actual storm itself. Modern technology has been used to do studies and it appears that it was a single, extremely violent and long-tracked tornado. Several studies (including several done by very respected members among the meteorological community) actually suggest the path was about 15 miles longer than originally thought. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hoosier Posted March 18, 2012 Author Share Posted March 18, 2012 Happy birthday. Do you think the tornado was one single funnel or a cycling supercell? The path is said to have been without breaks. Do you think modern technology would have found some? The damage path apparently was continuous and was accompanied by a larger area of straight line wind damage as some tornadoes are. I don't think we'll ever be able to say with absolute certainty that there weren't any brief breaks in the tornado, but it is interesting that reanalysis hasn't found any convincing evidence of that...whereas further analysis of some other events (e.g. May 26, 1917 long track IL tornado) has. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hoosier Posted March 18, 2012 Author Share Posted March 18, 2012 Of all the amazing things about this tornado, one of the more amazing to me is that the tornado killed over 500 people in a span of only 40 minutes. Consider that it is thought to have been on the ground for about 3.5 hours. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Indystorm Posted March 18, 2012 Share Posted March 18, 2012 Modern technology has been used to do studies and it appears that it was a single, extremely violent and long-tracked tornado. Several studies (including several done by very respected members among the meteorological community) actually suggest the path was about 15 miles longer than originally thought. I see you must have been aware of Doswell's study of a few years ago. I'll show my age and tell you that my father lived in Williamson County IL west of Herrin and experienced inflow into that storm and could see a dark boiling mass to the north of him. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andyhb Posted March 18, 2012 Share Posted March 18, 2012 Modern technology has been used to do studies and it appears that it was a single, extremely violent and long-tracked tornado. Several studies (including several done by very respected members among the meteorological community) actually suggest the path was about 15 miles longer than originally thought. I see you must have been aware of Doswell's study of a few years ago. I'll show my age and tell you that my father lived in Williamson County IL west of Herrin and experienced inflow into that storm and could see a dark boiling mass to the north of him. That must have been terrifying. Little did he know that he was witnessing the worst tornado in US history... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sickman Posted March 19, 2012 Share Posted March 19, 2012 And that it was moving extremely quickly too, not like some of the other slower moving violent tornadoes which have time to grind on their targets (Jarrell, etc.) and produced damage I would say is worse than most of them, particularly in IL. I would love to see a radar loop of this thing had it existed back then, and obviously pictures of the actual storm itself. Modern technology has been used to do studies and it appears that it was a single, extremely violent and long-tracked tornado. Several studies (including several done by very respected members among the meteorological community) actually suggest the path was about 15 miles longer than originally thought. The storm formed initially behind the cold front, then moved into the warm sector, aligned almost exactly with the low pressure center for the entire track. Also, in addition to its strange appearance, the funnel actually preceded the precipitation, rather than following it like most supercells. This setup probably attributed to the high death toll, especially in the rural areas. So, yes, a radar/satellite loop would be most fascinating. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hoosier Posted March 19, 2012 Author Share Posted March 19, 2012 The storm formed initially behind the cold front, then moved into the warm sector, aligned almost exactly with the low pressure center for the entire track. Also, in addition to its strange appearance, the funnel actually preceded the precipitation, rather than following it like most supercells. This setup probably attributed to the high death toll, especially in the rural areas. So, yes, a radar/satellite loop would be most fascinating. Wasn't the postfrontal idea discredited upon further review? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Baroclinicity Posted March 19, 2012 Share Posted March 19, 2012 This website was created to post the findings of the reanalysis team, but nothing is happening there so far: http://www.tristatetornado.org/ The powerpoint presentation by Doswell is still available through archive.org http://web.archive.org/web/20080307215010/http://apollo.lsc.vsc.edu/ams/AMS+VP/Storm+Conference/NESC+Presentations/32ndNESC_Presentation/Banquet/Doswell.ppt Reanalysis of surface data revealed that the storm likely formed ahead of the low and just north of the warm front. Information collected a few years ago pointed to a single tornado with a path of about 234 miles (there was still some data voids). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hoosier Posted March 19, 2012 Author Share Posted March 19, 2012 Who knows when/where there will be another event like Tri-State but I'd probably give a slight edge to the area east of the traditional alley. It seems like extremely fast storm motions tend to occur somewhat more often and that is obviously critical. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lilsparky Posted March 19, 2012 Share Posted March 19, 2012 I'm reading a pretty good book on my Kindle about this storm. Death RIdes the Sky. It's written by a woman who retraced the path of the storm in search of survivors and families to tell the story. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hoosier Posted November 28, 2013 Author Share Posted November 28, 2013 Bumping this thread to add these links as I hadn't seen them before. Both are good reads. The first one describes the meteorological setup that day and the second one presents a pretty detailed analysis of the track. A few quick points: 1) a dryline made it east of the Mississippi River as has been seen in some other notable outbreaks 2) many short gaps in damage were found (along with some longer ones) but it does not necessarily mean that the tornado wasn't on the ground 3) at least a couple of satellite tornadoes may have occurred in addition to separate tornadoes near the beginning/end in MO/IN 4) a previously undocumented tornado was uncovered in south-central IN, likely from the same cell http://www.flame.org/~cdoswell/publications/Maddox_etal_TriStateMeteor.pdf http://www.ejssm.org/ojs/index.php/ejssm/article/view/109/89 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ensō Posted November 28, 2013 Share Posted November 28, 2013 Wasn't the postfrontal idea discredited upon further review? Yes, most of the common "knowledge" about the Tri-State tornado has been discredited. I'm not sure how it even got started, really. Not to plug my own blog, but I wrote a post on it a few months ago. It covers the Tri-State tornado as well as the other violent tornadoes that occurred in Kentucky and Tennessee: http://stormstalker.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/tri-state-tornado/ I also put together a rough surface map for 18z, or about 50-ish minutes before the tornado touched down. The white line is the tornado's track. It stayed in a pretty ideal position for quite some time, near the center or slightly east-northeast relative to the surface low and right along or very slightly on the cool side of the warm front. More or less right at the triple point. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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