That’s amazing and great work but for the novice weather nerds, how does that happen?It detected a tornado in a storm that had not been warned. It was our video that caused the warning to be issued. Below is a screen grab of that video from our camera in Amory. Our goal is to take these statewide. My hope is this today provides the catalyst that finally opens the doors to donations and sponsors to make that happen.
Radar is great at telling you what it did, but can't tell you what it's doing. Under the best case conditions, a radar image is 3-5 minutes behind reality. In worst case conditions it can be 8-12. That's due to factors such as the time it takes for the radar to make a complete image scan. The radar image you see takes the radar 4 sweeps to create. Each sweep is at a different tilt...angle the radar is at. After that it has to send that data to its computer which translates all that data to the end product image. It then sends that image out to all the servers that show Radar. They then have to send that image out to all the apps or websites which then push it to you. That all takes time. Then throw in a high impact day like today and everybody and their grandmother has their phone out looking at their radar app which overloads the system slowing it down even more. So that storm could have wound up right after the last radar scan and produced the tornado before it had a chance to send out the next scan that would have shown it. Then there are other factors not at play with this instance where when a storm is a long ways from a radar site, the radar is blind below 7-10,000ft and just can't see it. The lowest angle a radar makes a sweep is 0.5 degrees. Doesn't sound like much but with the curvature of the earth it adds up. Once you get 75 miles from the Radar site the beam is typically 7,000ft high. That means it can't see anything below that.
That's awesome that it worked.It detected a tornado in a storm that had not been warned. It was our video that caused the warning to be issued. Below is a screen grab of that video from our camera in Amory. Our goal is to take these statewide. My hope is this today provides the catalyst that finally opens the doors to donations and sponsors to make that happen.
That one was a puzzler. It was clearly visible on relative velocity radar for 5 minutes at least before it was ever warned. The WTVA folks were talking about it way before the warning came out.
There wasn’t a lack of warning. Sometimes the tv guys will spot it before NWS issues a warning. Happens all the time around Memphis.
I've thought for years it was strange the way tornadoes always targeted trailer parks **
Get you one of these, they will wake you up at 4AM, for no reason at all(seems like)
What sort of notifications?
Amory/Monroe County is in the Memphis county warning area, but right on the edge of both the Jackson and Memphis county warning areas. Could be the NWS guys were concentrating more on other areas. It was a big weather day.
