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Early Addition
The National Weather Service has confirmed that an EF-2 tornado touched down in Bay Ridge this morning. That category of tornado has winds between 111 to 135 miles per hours, and roofs were blown off buildings and trees fell on top of cars and in the middle of roads. A resident told NY1, "I saw a mass of just leaves turning and it was just dark, like a dark mass. I was afraid and I saw the tree come down. I ran back inside and you could hear the wind. It sounded like a freight train coming through at full speed. It was like ‘whooooomp.’"
The Mayor visited the scene with various commissioners (NYPD, FDNY, OEM), and said that over 1,000 city workers were helping out to clear damaged areas. OEM Commissioner Joe Bruno told people with damage to their buildings to call 311 and contact the Department of Buildings. OEM also set up a command center in Sunset Park. Here's information about the city's response to the storm; interesting - you must contact the Parks Department about removing fallen trees and limbs to contain the spread of the Asian Long Horned Beetle.
And a woman died when her car, Mayor Bloomberg said, "got stuck in an underpass [on the Staten Island Expressway] and another car came long and hit hers." The collision sparked a fire, and the Mayor said, "Clearly, if we didn't have that rainstorm, she wouldn't be there, so that's one fataility due to the heavy rains." WABC 7 says the second driver was charged with driving with a suspended license.
Photographs by AngryCitizen.org on Flickr - tree on car and tree on fence
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Confirmed EF2.
For info on the EF scale & tornados in gen, go to:
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/faq/tornado/#About
Dadoc
Hello Mr. Global Warming. Welcome to New York City.
In answer to the last poster on previous thread, no, it's rough to predict such in advance in a non-tornado prone area.
When I last looked at the NOAA radar @ ~1:30 AM, all I could say was: Oh, thet's gonna be interesting in a few hours.
Cells crop up here as they approach the coast generally from West to East. The deform, crap out, reform & intensify in a very unpredictable fashion. Interaction with the Atlantic makes it funky.
Try watching the stuff from
www.weather.gov
Sorry, I'm a weather weenie.
Dadoc
You're absolutely right, Dadoc. Tornado warnings are a mix of art and science. Observations on the fine scale needed are difficult to make because of the high winds, hail, rain, lightning, etc. Without a large base of good observations it is hard to model tornado development with enough skill to always give sufficient warning.
Always though tornados could only form on flat places like Iowa.
When I think back from my time as a kid on our roof, from about 61st Street all the way to the Narrows, it's just like a flat plain.
Spoke to Mom again. A section of the Storage place two blocks away sheared off, took out part of the garage on 61st, and landed in a driveway on 61st. The sign in in my Mom's backyard. The storage place was built on the old VW lot, and was steel frame w/corrugated metal sheathing.
House @ 562 62nd Street (about 100 feet from Mom)
had the back torn off (see NY Daily News site).
Told Mom to get the digital I gave her 2 years ago for her birthday and send me some pics!
Ah, the elderly and technology.
Only being snarky cuz I'm glad she's OK.
Dadoc
I live in sunset and didn't see a tornado at all. where exactly was it?
In Re: # 6
As per last thread:
http://www.erh.noaa.gov/er/okx/pns/tonado_NYC.txt
Flickr shots show heavy damage to Erikson Park also (home of all my childhood stitches & abrasions).
If I fin any better info will submit
Dadoc
I was certain it was a tornado when I saw my boss flying level with my window on a vintage Schwinn.
That does it. I'm moving out of Williamsburg and moving back to Ohio.
There was a tornado in downtown Miami not too long ago. Humidity, wind, and a lot of other factors can create tornadoes and the mixture of art and science is a perfect description. It's not just flat land and thunderstorms that do it.
What's funny is that so many of the comments on the other post were so sure that a tornado could not have occured in Brooklyn, as if each commenter was a certified meteorologist. Leave it to the experts, people.
The tornado was about 30 blocks from me. It was crazy over here too - wild lightning.
I live just a block away from where the tornado touched down in Bay Ridge. The funny thing is that nothing on my block was damaged. However, only a block away there were uprooted trees, broken windows, crushed cars and many houses with sustained damage.
I grew up in the Midwest so I am used to sirens warning of an impending tornado as well as the strange stillness in the air that precedes a tornado. But this is the closest I've ever been to one!
I remember waking up in the middle of the night to the sounds of thunder. It was weird cause you usually hear maybe 3 or 4 booms and that's it. I heard like 15 booms in like 3 minutes. It was insane-o. It didn't even feel like a lot of water dripping.
Hello Mr. Global Warming. Welcome to New York City.
Because certainly it was absolutely 100% percent impossible for a tornado to ever set down in New York before.
A Brooklyn tornado is a rarity; the last one was in 1889 - NewsDay.com
7:53 PM EDT, August 8, 2007
With BC-NY--Severe Weather
Tornadoes, like the one that touched down Wednesday in Brooklyn and Staten Island, are a rarity in New York. Meteorologists believed Wednesday's storm produced the first tornado in Brooklyn since 1889. The National Weather Service had records of only a few other twisters in the city:
_ Oct. 27, 2003: A tornado classified as an F-0, the lowest possible severity, glances Staten Island.
_ Oct. 28, 1995: An F-1 tornado touches down on Staten Island, causing light damage.
_ Aug. 10, 1990: Three people are injured by an F-0 tornado on Staten Island.
_ Nov. 5, 1985: Six people are hurt by an F-1 tornado in Queens.
_ Sept. 2, 1974: An early morning tornado in the Bronx is later ranked an F-1.
---------
And from wcbstv.com: The National Weather Service confirmed Wednesday night that an EF1 tornado touched down in the Livingston-Randall Manor area of Staten Island before eventually becoming the EF2 that slammed into Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
During a 10-minute stretch around 6:30 a.m. Wednesday the twister skipped along a nine-mile path before zipping through the Verrazano Narrows and into Bay Ridge. The storm marked Brooklyn's first tornado since such weather events were recorded. Officials measured it to be an EF2 twister, characterized by winds of anywhere from 111 to 135 miles per hour.
Not only was the tornado the first ever in recorded history to touch down in Brooklyn, it's also was the first to hit a New York City borough since 1995, when a twister struck Staten Island.
Outside of those two, there have been only two other tornadoes to strike New York City. The first touched down in Queens in 1985 and the second in Staten Island in 1990.
Record-keeping of tornadoes began nationwide in 1950.
Now read about the cleanup:
http://rightinbayridge.blogspot.com/2007/08/pulp-truth-day-after-yesterday-in-bay.html
More photos I took around yesterday morning:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jorescobar/sets/72157601306793351/
Jorge Escobar
http://bitinthehead.com
Does anyone have any eyewitness or actual video of this Brooklyn twister? Would love to see that.
Tornadoes have smaller suction vortices within them. That's why sometimes one house is destroyed while the next one is unscathed.
Twisters and funnel clouds can happen pretty much anywhere given the right conditions. It just so happens that they are more frequent in places like Midwest where warm tropical air meets head on with cold artic air over hot flat land to form powerful supercells. It's rarer for us in NYC because we are simply a smaller blip on the radar and typical storms do not have that much punch when they get to us. Still, it's obviously not impossible as we can see here with all these past twisters. Nobody knows for certain why some t-storms spawn twisters while others do not.
very intersesting i was not aware of how many tornados hit new york.is the brooklyn one due to global warming? interesting concept.
"Tornadoes have smaller suction vortices within them. That's why sometimes one house is destroyed while the next one is unscathed.
Twisters and funnel clouds can happen pretty much anywhere given the right conditions. It just so happens that they are more frequent in places like Midwest where warm tropical air meets head on with cold artic air over hot flat land to form powerful supercells. It's rarer for us in NYC because we are simply a smaller blip on the radar and typical storms do not have that much punch when they get to us. Still, it's obviously not impossible as we can see here with all these past twisters. Nobody knows for certain why some t-storms spawn twisters while others do not."
While nothing of what you wrote above is technically wrong, it is vastly simplified to an end of providing a very incomplete picture. First, the "moist unstable airmass meeting cold dry airmass = supercells" explanation is a favorite of the media. This is just generic enough to flirt with being of no value. If you want to offer a standard explanation of the ingredients requisite for severe, it would be better represented with the following:
1) Instability (e.g., CAPE, or Convective Available Potential Energy)
2) Wind shear (see below)
3) moisture (Tds or dewpoints, which depicts the moisture content of the surface and boundary layers of the atmosphere)
4) A trigger (cold front, warm front, dryline, outflow boundary, etc.)
To state these factors is to merely be slightly less simplistic. For instance, to say that wind shear (wind that changes speed and direction with height) is required for supercells is true, but very incomplete.
There are different criteria for representing shear values. One measure of shear focuses on a snapshot of the atmosphere from 0-6 kilometers. This is known as bulk shear, which takes into account various facets of shear to arrive at an aggregate measure of it. There are other kinds of shear as well. Vertical shear is wind that changes direction with height. Speed shear is wind that changes speed with height. The magnitude of vertical (or deep layer) shear, for instance, is a means of estimating the chance that an updraft will develop rotation (a mesocyclone). Consequently, When the updraft develops rotation through a deep portion of the mid section of the storm, and if that rotation persists for periods of 15 minutes or more, the storm is classified as a 'supercell.'
While all this specific information is probably more than the average person needs or wants to know, you can see how saying that 'cold air meeting hot air creates supercells' is the opposite extreme. I could write another 5,000 words explaining how and why supercells develop. But I just wanted to offer an example of the intricacies as a balance to the oversimplifications.
As for not knowing why some storms engender tornadoes and other don't, well, I could get into RFD (rear flank downdraft) interactions, balanced inflow and outflow, gate-to-gate shear, and horizontal rolls, but I won't. :-)
Mesocyclonically,
Long Time Storm Observer