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The Science and Mystery of the Twin Tornadoes That Hit Nebraska

posted by Woods on Thursday June 19 2014, @02:49PM   
from the fascinating-weather-patterns dept.

gewg_ writes:

I heard an item on the radio where the twin twisters that clobbered a Nebraska community were said to be described by meteorologists as rare; the question "Is this due to climate change?" was also posed and left dangling. Investigating further at Google News, I found another item where a storm chaser was saying "I've never seen anything like this".

I then found an article by Andrew Freedman which says there's a wide range of tornado types and that storms which split aren't all that rare.

Pioneering tornado scientist Theodore Fujita, who devised the Fujita Tornado Damage Scale that is still used to classify tornado intensity, identified many types of tornadoes, some of which bore similarities to the twin twisters in Nebraska on Monday.

For example, the Palm Sunday tornado outbreak of 1965, during which nearly 50 tornadoes touched down and 271 people died, there was a well-documented dual tornado that struck close to Toledo, Ohio. A study Fujita published with his colleagues found that this tornado split for only a short time, coalescing back into a larger funnel soon after a famous picture was taken that bears some resemblance to the Pilger tornado.

"A single funnel split into two and then reorganized into one after about a minute," the study says.

Interesting reading.

• Witnessed these two up close & personal (Score: 3, Informative) by zocalo on Thursday June 19 2014, @07:07PM

  by zocalo (302) on Thursday June 19 2014, @07:07PM (#57564)

  Currently storm chasing across the mid-west and our group was less than five miles from Pilger when it got hit, watching the two tornados advance either side of the road we were on. General consensus from the tour leaders was that twin tornados are pretty common (we another, slightly smaller, pair in South Dakota yesterday), but it is much more rare to get twin tornadoes as powerful as those in such close proximity, but it can and does happen - they usually see similar tornado pairs every other year or so. The big difference here seems to be that the footage was good and the devastation of Pilger along with lives lost made for a good news story, much of which blew the scale of devastation out of proportion to what we saw on the ground. Some of the more hyperbolic coverage claiming "Nebraska was flattened" (I can only assume their reporters have never even seen Nebraska), when in reality the devastation was only a handful of square miles were trashed, which unfortunately included a small town in which two people died.

  --
  UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!

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