Tuesday, June 04, 2013

Speaking of wind sweeping down, Updated

The massive tornado contained several powerful "subvortices," areas of extremely rapid rotation that swirled within the larger tornadic circulation. These subvortices contained the strongest wind speeds measured within the tornado, greater than 295 miles per hour in several different instances -- well above the 201-mph minimum requirement for a EF5 designation.
And size:
In addition, the width of the tornado has been given a "conservative" estimate of 2.6 miles. This is a new record for the widest tornado in history, beating the previous record of 2.5 miles near Hallam, Neb. on May 22, 2004.

For those of you in metric lands, that's  'greater than 475 kilometers per hour' and 'estimate of 4.2 kilometers wide'.

My house is about 2.5 miles north of I40, daughter's slightly less than a mile.  So when a airborne vacuum this size was reported traveling right along I40, you'll understand it was worrying.

Update: more on the weather, in this case what the rains did.

1 comment:

Irish said...

Holy Crap!.. Mother nature sure can be nasty. It's amazing people lived.