This is New England NOT Kansas, right ?

[Bruce K]

Tornado Alert just came chirping over my cell phone.

Not the Weather Sevice alert but the "Take cover NOW!!!" Type of sleet

I have never heard that kind of tone before do it really caught my attention

Hopefully if blows over bug I'm guessing there's something really bad on the radar

But this is the freakin' North Shore of Boston !

BK

[Tom]

Had three of them in one day within 15 miles of the Dorptown a few weeks back, including one that was on the ground for 17 miles and was an F2 for a while.

We get one every few years, three in a day was a definite outlier.

I have to admit after seeing what it did up on the hill I'm glad we only get baby ones around here.

Hope you guys don't get one, no matter what size.

[EDS]

Tornado Alert just came chirping over my cell phone.

Not the Weather Sevice alert but the "Take cover NOW!!!" Type of sleet

I have never heard that kind of tone before do it really caught my attention

Hopefully if blows over bug I'm guessing there's something really bad on the radar

But this is the freakin' North Shore of Boston !

BK

Just make sure the roads are all clean so I can ride up there later this week!

:)

[cnighbor1]

Yep weather chanel has them in your area up to 5pm

[SPOKE]

Received two such warnings Saturday in North Myrtle Beach SC.
It got my attention!!!

If the national weather service can find you (your phone anyway), so can someone else.....:)

[1centaur]

A weird psychological experience for those not used to such things. My office window happens to look the 30 miles north to the giant dark cloud bank over my house, and I spent an hour or so on the phone with my wife as she alternated watching the same breathless weatherman as I (on a live stream of a TV broadcast advising people street by street to go to their basements now) and going out the front door to tell me it's not particularly windy and not very dark. The weather guy specifically mentioned our town many times, talked about the system entering our town, moving across our town, and just about to exit our town (which I was watching live on the radar) and he really knew his stuff and predicted things the computer predicted seconds later. But in the end, it wasn't even a real thunderstorm for us. It almost felt like an Orson Welles hoax.

All the while I was looking out on Boston harbor where sail boats and harbor cruise vessels were happily ambling about under partially blue skies.

[godfrey1112000]

But no beach

[BumbleBeeDave]

It's like this EVERY summer in Kansas and Oklahoma. When I was a kid we would NEVER cancel a ride unless the wind was above 80mph. :no:

What a bunch of little kids. This is exactly what I worried would happen to America. I thought a lot about this when I was a kid while I was walking back and forth 5 miles to school barefoot in the snow--uphill both ways, too! ;)

BBD

[daker13]

One showed up at my mother in law's place in NH (near Conway) a few years ago and it did major damage. Missed her house but took down many many trees, at a major expense, plus some smaller buildings on her property. I grew up in NH and honestly didn't think tornadoes could happen there either. I picked up a couple books on New England weather and found we do indeed get tornadoes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Worcester_tornado

[MattTuck]

One showed up at my mother in law's place in NH (near Conway) a few years ago and it did major damage. Missed her house but took down many many trees, at a major expense, plus some smaller buildings on her property. I grew up in NH and honestly didn't think tornadoes could happen there either. I picked up a couple books on New England weather and found we do indeed get tornadoes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Worcester_tornado

It is funny you say this. I've heard on the radio and TV that tornadoes are a purely North American phenomenon. That it is related to the cold dry air coming over the rockies mixing with warm wet air from the gulf of mexico... which I understand leads to the tornado activity in the midwest. But, I don't understand why they would occur in new england (obviously, they do!)... and why if it happens in New England, that it couldn't happen in other areas of the world.

[Louis]

Wikipedia says that they've been observed on every continent except Antarctica. The vast majority have been in the US Midwest, but there's no reason they can't happen elsewhere.

[rounder]

We have had weird weather in Maryland recently, including severe storm warnings where I got messages on the phone. A few weeks ago it got really dark early. We got a lot of rain and wind but no damage. I was riding around the next day and did not see much damage at all until I came to a house on a hill where there were about 20-30 hardwood trees that were either uprooted or were broken off at the trunk. The sheared trees trees were broken off at about 20' up. There were only a few damaged trees before and after that house. Weird.

[shovelhd]

We had an F2 tear right through downtown Springfield a few years ago. Destroyed my kids school. It kept going all the way to Brimfield.

[rounder]

It is funny you say this. I've heard on the radio and TV that tornadoes are a purely North American phenomenon. That it is related to the cold dry air coming over the rockies mixing with warm wet air from the gulf of mexico... which I understand leads to the tornado activity in the midwest. But, I don't understand why they would occur in new england (obviously, they do!)... and why if it happens in New England, that it couldn't happen in other areas of the world.

Don't quote me on this because I do not remember exactly, but I heard a story about tornados on the news a few weeks ago. They said that the U.S. gets far more tornados than any other country at about 800 per year (so far this year we are below average), and Canada is second at about 100 tornados per year. No one else is close. On the other hand, we do not get that many tsunamis.

[branflakes]

blame george w. bush!

[BumbleBeeDave]

. . . here is Schenectady we had Irene, another tropical storm, a tornado west of town, AND an earthquake(!) all in a 10 day period. It was an interesting couple of weeks.

BTW, all our local club rides went on as scheduled, since none of the sustained winds wee over 80 mph. ;)

BBD

[shovelhd]

I raced Chris Thater in Binghamton the morning Irene came through. My drive back to western MA was sketchy. Irene did major damage out here, knocking out a bunch of bridges and roads. The debris field on some of these little brooks and streams was amazing. Huge boulders 20 feet above the normal waterline.

[Tom]

During the one in the Dorptown a few weeks ago, a guy I work with said how he knew something was very different was that for a while it was a typical thunderstorm type wind and rain event thrashing the tops of the trees around but then abruptly the wind shifted 180 degrees and was sucking everything along right at ground level. The tornado was just finishing up about a mile from where he lives.

[Bruce K]

Fortunately, no tornados but a confirmed and photographed waterspout just off the coast between Gloucester and Ipswich

Those are cool!

BK

[redir]

There was huge tornado in Windsor Locks when I was a kid. I think it was late 70's 80's maybe. My father and I were stuck in it and it did quite a bit of damage.

[cfox]

There was huge tornado in Windsor Locks when I was a kid. I think it was late 70's 80's maybe. My father and I were stuck in it and it did quite a bit of damage.

My wife grew up in Suffield; she still talks about that day. Very scary. Major damage on her street. She said the sky was pitch black and it sounded like a freight train was running through her house.

[redir]

My wife grew up in Suffield; she still talks about that day. Very scary. Major damage on her street. She said the sky was pitch black and it sounded like a freight train was running through her house.

Yea we never actually saw a tornado but it was so black you could not see past 20 feet and it was still a good way away from us though some trees came down near by. I can't imagine actually being right in one, it amazes me how people survive that aver looking at the total wreckage.

[Bruce K]

That Windsor, CT tornado was the one that put the VW bug in the top of a tree in the Mass Pike median

It sat there for years!

BK

[bcm119]

Baby tornadoes aren't that uncommon in the northeast. They tend to happen in the north-south valleys, where the terrain influences the surface wind direction and skews it a bit from the wind direction a little higher up, increasing wind shear. The confluence of the Hudson and Mohawk valleys is a little hotspot for tornadic activity, and the upper CT river valley seems to be also. Sometimes a supercell thunderstorm will form as a front crosses the CT river valley and move out onto the coastal plain. One tornado I remember cut a swath through a hillside forest on the Taconic parkway in Columbia county, I think it was around Copake, maybe 1995 or so. You could see the devastated forest for years afterwards driving the Taconic.

Far more common are downbursts. They are often confused with tornadoes because they cause a very isolated swath of wind damage, but it is straight-line winds, not a swirling pattern. Downbursts are just really strong downdrafts of cold dense air that basically fall out of the belly of a strong thunderstorm, hit the ground, and spread out in a strip of 80-100 mph wind.

[shovelhd]

There was huge tornado in Windsor Locks when I was a kid. I think it was late 70's 80's maybe. My father and I were stuck in it and it did quite a bit of damage.

A small tornado went through there on Monday. The usual downed trees and power lines, no injuries or deaths. You could see the tobacco netting caught in the trees on the side of I-91.

[Bruce K]

I think the National Weather Service classified it as a microburst

Or maybe that was western MA.....

BK

[shovelhd]

I think the National Weather Service classified it as a microburst

Or maybe that was western MA.....

BK

There was one of each. I thought the tornado was in CT and the microburst in Agawam, MA, but I could be mistaken.

[Bruce K]

Me too:rolleyes:

BK