News Horrific tornado strikes Oklahoma.

[Urwumpe]

Violent and unexpected, little could have been done.

Extremely violent - yes.

Unexpected - No. That the weather situation was volatile already from Sunday on had been known and part of warnings. It rather feels like there wasn't much awareness left because there had been already many tornadoes in this outbreak.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_18–20,_2013_tornado_outbreak

 

[Quick_Nick]

Extremely violent - yes.

Unexpected - No. That the weather situation was volatile already from Sunday on had been known and part of warnings. It rather feels like there wasn't much awareness left because there had been already many tornadoes in this outbreak.

Maybe. Constant sirens and wind damage can be mentally taxing, but the warning/awareness is still there.
My information from friends in the areas is that there was warning and that it saved lives. I can't say personally that it goes for everyone, and certainly can't take news reports as exact truth either.
(just some thoughts - you're good about your research)

---------- Post added at 04:22 AM ---------- Previous post was at 04:19 AM ----------

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_18–20,_2013_tornado_outbreak

Yikes. Hail larger than tennis balls in Norman.
We had warnings about such hail and some high wind a couple weeks ago and had to take shelter. But the storms moved just north of campus, as with this much more powerful storm. The University of Oklahoma is currently housing anyone who needs a home until they reach capacity.

91 deaths currently according to that page. (for anyone skimming this thread)

---------- Post added at 04:40 AM ---------- Previous post was at 04:22 AM ----------

In a growing trend of the 21st century, online resources are available for finding loved ones and such.
http://google.org/crisismap/2013-oklahoma-tornado

When we had those storms a few weeks ago, I got good use of Google Now's public alerts. (aren't push notifications the best?)

More storms are heading for Moore, or at least the region, at the moment.

 

[Cizurator]

Damn american wooden houses....nowhere to hide.

 

[Quick_Nick]

Damn american wooden houses....nowhere to hide.

This is no wooden house.
And take a look at the earlier pictures.
Unless you want to live underground...

---------- Post added at 05:45 AM ---------- Previous post was at 05:42 AM ----------

The storms going on at this minute are very strong as far as thunderstorms go. Hope it gets no worse but there will certainly be damage over the next hours.

 

[Urwumpe]

Damn american wooden houses....nowhere to hide.

For fairness, it has to be said, that even European brick houses would not be left after such a tornado. There would be less damage here during weaker tornadoes, also less fatalities. But in Micheln, Germany, just a EF3 tornado had been able to heavily damage 70% of all buildings. Not to the extend of this one, but only optically slightly better than the EF3 damage in the USA.

http://www.naturgewalten.de/micheln.htm

This one had possibly spawned a tornado only 400 meters away from my parents house, about 80 km before Micheln. We had a 50 meter wide damage path through the fields north of the village, this line also passed near Michaeln and the event happened about one hour earlier. A microburst would be a possibility there, but then, while the corn was really plucked from the soil, the trees left and right of the damage path had been unharmed, which is strange for a microburst event. But nobody observed the Tornado here.

 

[Athena]

Looks like it's not over yet (from my friend's radar app thing)

 

[Urwumpe]

Looks like it's not over yet (from my friend's radar app thing)

I see no hook echoes there at all, so I would say it is "just" heavy rain, which will make the clean up and search for the missing harder.

 

[Athena]

I see no hook echoes there at all, so I would say it is "just" heavy rain, which will make the clean up and search for the missing harder.

Some questions about that:

1. What's that yellow shape of some sort indicate?
2. What's reflectivity that i always see on radar maps?

 

[Quick_Nick]

I see no hook echoes there at all, so I would say it is "just" heavy rain, which will make the clean up and search for the missing harder.

It's taking down some more trees at least as well.
Again, hoping that will be the maximum extent of it.
Hopefully people take into consideration large hail and dark wet roads before thinking about commuting today.

 

[Urwumpe]

Some questions about that:
1. What's that yellow shape of some sort indicate?

Depends on the visualization of the App, but it looks like it represents the automatically calculated danger zones of a detected thunderstorm.

2. What's reflectivity that i always see on radar maps?

It is the signal power that is returned to the radar by the precipitation (and other things) in the clouds. You can have different forms of reflectivity if the radar is capable of using different polarizations, which you can then use for telling hail, rain or sucked up debris apart.

---------- Post added at 01:32 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:27 PM ----------

It's taking down some more trees at least as well.
Again, hoping that will be the maximum extent of it.
Hopefully people take into consideration large hail and dark wet roads before thinking about commuting today.

More interesting is looking at radar films to tell if there are splitting thunderstorms today, which would be a good first sign of developing trouble.

I usually had my best chases looking for right movers.

 

[Screamer7]

I feel terrible sorry for the victims of this nightmare.
Just in a matter of minutes lives are taken, children included, and homes destroyed.
Many people's live are altered in a matter of an hour.
It really makes me feel small and grateful for what I have.

 

[Urwumpe]

The number of fatalities had been lowered a lot to 24 deaths. Many of the victims had been counted twice in the initial estimates, now only three victims are not identified.

Also, news reports mention a report by a US engineer organization, that inspected the rebuilded buildings of Moore after the 1999 Tornado three years ago and concluded, that the new buildings had not been safer than the destroyed buildings at all. But I have not yet found the primary source for that claim.

 

[Scav]

that the new buildings had not been safer than the destroyed buildings at all.

Not much is going to be safe in the face of 200+ mph winds.

 

[Zatnikitelman]

Also, you have to include that this weather was everything but normal. Even people who did everything right had been in very dangerous situations.

That is one is counted as EF-4+ is a bit strange, since there are quite many examples of EF-5 damage around (more than EF-4 examples), like only the foundations of buildings being left and even stronger buildings having their sidewalls removed completely. And the size of the damage area is also unbelieveable, you would rather expect a hurricane to cause this.

It won't be given a final rating until after the damage surveys are complete. It's wise not to jump the gun and declare something to be worse than it is before all the facts are known. Though I agree, it will probably reach EF-5 once the surveys are done. As to the extent of damage, it was reported that the funnel reached 2 miles wide (3.2km) at one point.

What disturbs is the short time between warning and impact. This one travelled pretty slowly (40 minutes on the ground, 32 km distance = about 50 km/h on the average) and was so huge that the rotation must have been visible as extraordinary on radar earlier, so that a warning even if no tornado sighting is confirmed might have been better. I have not seen such huge hooks often on radar images, I am not even sure if at all in that size. Also it must have been on the ground already for about 10 minutes before reaching the denser populated areas of Moore.

I discovered this morning that Moore had 36 minutes of lead time before the storm hit. But where do you go? Schools don't exactly have storm shelters big enough for the entire student body and with an EF-5, everything above-ground just disappears, even the grass in many cases.

Damn american wooden houses....nowhere to hide.

The school was likely a cinderblock building, but it was still utterly destroyed too.

Some questions about that:

1. What's that yellow shape of some sort indicate?

That's a severe thunderstorm warning for the areas, it is not automatically generated, it is created by a person usually at a National Weather Service field office for their area. Other apps have similar displays, but maybe different colors. For instance GRLevel3, displays severe thunderstorm warnings in red, and tornado warnings in purple rather than yellow and red respectively.

2. What's reflectivity that i always see on radar maps?

Reflectivity in this context is a measure of the intensity of the precipitation. In relation to tornadoes, it's good for seeing hook-echoes, but that's about it. To see tornadoes, you need a velocity display, the "doppler" in doppler radar.
http://i226.photobucket.com/albums/dd230/Zatnikitelman/1202032023atlanta_zpsff4a3d68.png
In the image above, top left is reflectivity, and you can sort of see a hook echo, but not very well defined. However, if you look right to the base velocity, or down to the storm-relative velocity (basically removes overall storm motion from the mix) you can see the tight green (inbound) and red (outbound) velocities which indicate rotation. The actual center looks a little to the right of the triangular "TVS" indicator, and a little above the lower red circle.

If anyone's interested, here's an animated loop of the reflectivity display of the Moore storm.
https://i.minus.com/iluhrlDRbUSAQ.gif


Also, death toll from Moore looks to have dropped officially to 24 at this point. Apparently some people were counted twice.

 

[Urwumpe]

I discovered this morning that Moore had 36 minutes of lead time before the storm hit. But where do you go? Schools don't exactly have storm shelters big enough for the entire student body and with an EF-5, everything above-ground just disappears, even the grass in many cases.

I also read that there had been already 18 minutes of warning before the Tornado actually touched down. It really wasn't unexpected.

But one school there was not only badly designed for the center of Tornado Alley, it also had a pretty bad evacuation plan. The students had been brought in groups to a 300 meter away church, that was considered safer. Some classes had already been brought to relative safety, while others still waited for evacuation. The long warning time was effectively wasted.

The school was likely a cinderblock building, but it was still utterly destroyed too.

Worse, A 47 year old concrete building made with the cheapest material of its time. Without a storm shelter at all.

Also I think that you can have a school with storm shelters for every student + nearby citizens. You just either need to have smaller schools or bigger shelters. Some German constructions had been capable of holding thousands of citizens during WW2 and had been impossible to destroy even after the war. Of course such bunkers are usually ugly as hell (well, not always), but you can build them and they would survive a tornado as well.

---------- Post added at 07:36 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:21 PM ----------

If anyone's interested, here's an animated loop of the reflectivity display of the Moore storm.
https://i.minus.com/iluhrlDRbUSAQ.gif

Also it shows great how the Tornado formed, if you follow how the rear flank downdraft (the tail of heavy rain following the thunderstorm) turns into a hook echo by the updraft and later into a hurricane like whirl.

And how the Tornado dissipates once the RFD completely wraps around the tornado and blocks the updraft.

Also it seems like a large deal of the intensity was caused by this supercell being overtaken by a smaller faster moving thunderstorm. You can see it coming from the SW corner and being absorbed while approaching Moore. It looks like this added a lot of water to the supercell for the tornado to consume while it was pulled into and up the updraft.

BTW, do you know a source for getting raw radar data for visualization? I feel interesting in trying to make an animated volume rendering of the cloud.

 

[Kyle]

The number of fatalities had been lowered a lot to 24 deaths. Many of the victims had been counted twice in the initial estimates, now only three victims are not identified.

Also, news reports mention a report by a US engineer organization, that inspected the rebuilded buildings of Moore after the 1999 Tornado three years ago and concluded, that the new buildings had not been safer than the destroyed buildings at all. But I have not yet found the primary source for that claim.

That's very strange then, because if the total was 51 earlier.. that means they counted everyone twice in the initial estimates and some even three times. This leads me to believe that the death toll was never as high as the media was reporting it to be. The damage though is likely to be in the billions.

---------- Post added at 07:54 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:39 PM ----------

A horrifying before and after picture. The NWS has reported at least one instance of EF-5 damage in Moore and this tornado will probably be upgraded to an EF-5 by days end.

EDIT -- News is reporting that the tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma yesterday has been indeed upgraded to an EF-5 tornado.

 

[Urwumpe]

Confirmed, is now a EF-5 Tornado:

https://twitter.com/NWSNorman/status/336929255596371968

https://nwschat.weather.gov/p.php?pid=201305211953-KOUN-NOUS44-PNSOUN

---------- Post added at 11:08 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:53 PM ----------

And here is NASAs view of the Tornado:

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/moore-tornado.html

 

[Kyle]

First recorded EF-5 tornado in two years, since the El Reno tornado in May 2011.

 

[BruceJohnJennerLawso]

Damn american wooden houses....nowhere to hide.

What do you live in, a steel bunker?

That's very strange then, because if the total was 51 earlier.. that means they counted everyone twice in the initial estimates and some even three times. This leads me to believe that the death toll was never as high as the media was reporting it to be. The damage though is likely to be in the billions.

---------- Post added at 07:54 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:39 PM ----------

A horrifying before and after picture. The NWS has reported at least one instance of EF-5 damage in Moore and this tornado will probably be upgraded to an EF-5 by days end.

EDIT -- News is reporting that the tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma yesterday has been indeed upgraded to an EF-5 tornado.

Reminds me of Hiroshima, very sad.

 

[Urwumpe]

What do you live in, a steel bunker?

I build my house of stone
I build my house of bricks
I've had no chance
To sing and dance
'Cause work and play don't mix.