The Salvation Army and American Red Cross spearheaded major drives to aid disaster victims. The local radio had reported inaccurately that my town was "wiped out." Twenty-one tornadoes tracked across Northeast Ohio and Northwest Pennsylvania during the evening of May 31st. Based on the 00Z LFM run, I, along with SELS Lead Forecaster Larry Wilson, decidedthat if thunderstorms did develop, that they would go strongly severe across the areahencethe Moderate Risk. As we were running back and forth between the teletype and radar rooms to the telephone to make calls to the radio stations we were dodging carpet cleaning equipment. Please try another search. The storm paralleled I-80, so a track a bit further south would have been a disaster. I worked the evening shift at "SELS" (the Severe Local Storms Unit of the National Severe Storms Forecast Center, as the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) was known in those days) on Friday, 31 May 1985. Severe Weather 101: Tornado FAQ - NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory As mentioned earlier, wind shear, or more importantly wind shear of the right magnitude and direction, will cause thunderstorms to rotate, which is a precursor to tornado development. The air felt like water-vapor soup. As I took in all the devastation, I could not understand how so many actually survived. Seconds later the tornado touched down just beyond the house and tore a path to the next town, destroying homes and blowing a train off of the railroad tracks. Philadelphia County has had 12 tornadoes since 1958. What he saw in storm surveys was almost unimaginable. I worked 3-11 shift at the local hospital in Greenville PA. May 31, 1985 started out quietly in Northeast Ohio and Northwest Pennsylvania, but danger loomed on the horizon. CLEM MARION | Herald fileA splintered wood-frame house lies on its side in Wheatland after being hit by the May 31, 1985, tornado that tore through the borough. Also note the deep closed low north of the Great Lakes. Exceptionally rare, these tornadoes can produce wind speeds higher than 200 mph. I said to my boss "you never know what's going to happen when it gets like this." It was in the early evening on thatFridaynight and I was at a friends house when we noticed that the sky had gotten very dark and the wind had increased dramatically. Many other hospital workers and I went in, and we opened a floor to take in victims. The visible satellite loop above shows the development and explosive growth of thunderstorms across southern Ontario, Ohio, western Pennsylvania and western New York on the afternoon of May 31, This two day series of Daily Weather Maps (courtesy NOAA/NWS) shows the eastward progression of the cold front; from near Chicago on Friday morning May 31, Precipitation looks like a hook on the radar returns; showing. StormReady To qualify as an F1 event, a tornado must have a wind speed of 73 miles per hour or above. Although I had a few ideas at that point, nothing really stood out to me as something that I would want to do as a career. Thirty-five years later, despite remarkable advances in radar and other technologies, tornadoes and their inner lives remain enigmas to atmospheric scientists. Following two particularly devastating tornadoes in 1997 and 1999, engineers questioned the reliability of the Fujita scale. Storm Events Database. The winds estimated by the Fujita Scale are estimated values and have not been verified scientifically. [1] We understood at the time that supercell storms behaved differently from ordinary cells.
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