North Dakota Tornado Death Was First Since April

Mobile homes and RVs were scattered to the wind during an early
morning tornado that killed a baby and injured more than
two dozen others. 

Early Tuesday morning, a tornado swept through a Watford City, North Dakota RV park, tragically killing a newborn baby and injuring more than two dozen others, some of them critically.

This was an RV park, but some of the buildings there were mobile homes that people lived in permanently. Or at least wanted to, before the tornado hit.

There's nothing good about this news, of course. Except that the death was an unusual rarity for this year.

The peak of tornado season was in May and June, though tornadoes are certainly possible any time of year. Most tornado deaths come in the late spring and early summer in the United States. This year, for only the second time on record, nobody died in the nation from tornadoes in May and June. 

Before Tuesday, the last time someone died in a tornado was on April 13, in Bossier City, Louisiana.

This is the second time in just over four years that Watford City has been struck by a dangerous tornado. In May, 2014, a twister hit an oil workers' trailer camp, injuring nine people. That tornado produced a viral video of a man filming the tornado at close range.

A Wonderfully Tornadic Bill Paxton Tribute

A map showing the location of
storm chasers in Oklahoma
and surrounding states indicates
them forming into a giant "BP"
formation to honor the actor Bill
Paxton, who died Sunday.
Paxton starred in the tornado
disaster movie "Twister."

The death of actor Bill Paxton was announced Sunday and tributes for this great actor are pouring in from all over.

One of the most popular films Paxton starred in was "Twister" the 1996 film about storm and tornado chasers in the Great Plains.

A lot of people who were young when that movie came out credit the film for inspiring their careers in meteorology, storm chasing, storm photography, science and related fields.

So it was that a unique and movingly nerdy tribute to Paxton took shape Sunday afternoon.

Hundreds of tornado chasers use their Spotter Network markers to show where they are during tornado chases.

On line, you can see maps showing where as many as a few dozen chasers are clustered near a thunderstorm producing tornadoes during severe weather outbreaks.

Sunday, there were no tornadoes in Oklahoma, where the movie "Twister" was set. But storm chasers there were extremely active, and it all showed up on maps.

Several dozen of them gathered in various places in Oklahoma, so when you looked on a map, as you can see in the image in this post, they spelled out the giant initials "BP" across the entire state of Oklahoma, in tribute to Bill Paxton.

Variety reported that Paxton also made the IMAX documentary "Tornado Alley" and had a fascination with severe weather, having grown up in Texas.

The storm chaser tribute to Paxton was a bit strange, but it was beautiful. Kudos to all those storm chasers who did that.

As Expected, Monday Was A Stormy Nightmare. Same Thing Today

Water rescues in Kentucky Monday.
Photo from Kentucky Emergency Management

As I noted early yesterday morning, the day would be a busy one for severe weather, and that certainly came true.

On top of the picturesque Kansas tornado I highlighted earlier today, much less fun, much more sad conditions stretched from Minnesota to North Carolina.

This included severe thunderstorm winds, hail, and even worse flash floods.

My prediction of a derecho I think came true, although that's still being verified. Derechos, you recall, are long lasting very severe thunderstom complexes that can literally almost go cross country.

The storm complex that developed with this outbreak got going near the North Dakota/Canada border Sunday, ended up in Wisconsin early Monday, and traveled toward the southeast, ending up in North Carolina last night.

Talk about a cross country journey! It produced damaging winds and flash floods along all of its path.

Behind this maybe derecho, more batches of intense thunderstorms formed. Some raked over the same areas over and over, dumping torrential rains and causing terrible flash floods.

One of the worst was in Kentucky, where at least one person died and several are missing. Widespread reports of flash flooding came in from Minnesota to West Virgina to western New York.

No one large area was devastated, but local flash floods caused extreme damage in some areas, plus the wind, the lighting and such I'm sure caused many, many millions of dollars worth of damage in wide areas of the central and eastern United States.

Today is shaping up to be almost as bad. Torrential thunderstorms continued into this morning in parts of Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia and southwestern New York. These same areas are due for more severe, torrential storms today, so things don't look good.

As of shortly past noon today, severe thunderstorm warnings and a tornado warning were up for parts of the Ohio Valley. A huge U-shaped area from western New York to Indiana and back over to Maryland were under flash flood watches.

Within this zone, some areas have flash flood warnings, which means the high water is happening now or will any second now.

As you can tell by this post, the most destruction from this severe storm outbreak came frorm torrential rain and flooding.

The inevitable question comes up: It seems these storms tend to cause more and more flooding. Is global climate change a culprit?

Maybe. These repeated, flooding storms are consistent with what climate scientists say would happen in a warming world. Just today, I read an article in which a team of German scientists concluded the last 30 years or so have seen a sharp increase in torrential storms and flooding across much of the planet.

In general, warmer air can hold more moisture than colder air, so if a storm comes along, there's more water available for heavier rain. Of course, if there's no storm system, and storms avoid a particular area, like California for months or years, you get big droughts, not big floods.

There has obviously always been big flash floods like the ones yesterday in Kentucky and elsewhere, but the trend is for the frequency and severeity of these floods to increase.

As an illustration of how bad things got, he's a video of a house washing away in the floods in Kentucky, then smacking into a bridge. Yikes!

"Goodbye, Mama": Instant Communication Drives Home Tragedy Of Tornado Deaths

Last week, I was following the tornado outbreak in the Plains and Southeast with an immediacy that was unimaginable even a decade ago.

A before and after view
of an Arkansas neighborhood
hit by a tornado last Sunday.  

A tornado would touch down somewhere, and a couple minutes after it did, there was an image of it on Twitter.

I could follow live video streams of the storms, watch local television stations warn the public, and listen to police scanner traffic of the unfolding disaster, all in real time.

Then there was this story that came out of Arkansas of the immediacy of tragedy. A EF-4 tornado west and north of Little Rock claimed 15 of the 37 lives lost in the tornado outbreak.

Regina Wood said she was giving her understandably scared college age son Jeffrey Hunter, updates via text on the big tornado as it approached him in Vilonia, Arkansas last Sunday 

The house apparently had no basement, and he had no time to run, nowhere to hide. His mother kept trying to encourage him as he holed up in a bathroom.

As the tornado started to tear the house apart, Hunter was able to send one last text.  Said Wood: "I have a text on my phone as the tornado was hitting, 'Goodbye mama.'"

Hunter indeed died in the storm. The one, slight consolation for Wood is thanks to modern technology, she knows she was among her son's last thoughts before he died.

But I also have to wonder if it hurts more, knowing the details of what he was going through, the increasing panic as the storm approached. And the helplessness Wood must have felt as the tornado closed in on her son, and she could do nothing about it.

I shudder just thinking about it.

Tornado Outbreak Over; Stormy Weather In Vermont To End Soon

Many people in Vermont probably heard a gusty downpour bluster through before dawn this Monday morning.

Washington, Illinois after Sunday's deadly tornadoes. 

That was the remnants of that terrible tornado outbreak in the Midwest Sunday.

The Vermont storms, such as they were, caused minor power failures and knocked down a few tree limbs. Not a big deal, especially if you compare that to the Midwest.

At last report, at least six people are known to have died in the tornado outbreak, one of the worst November tornado swarms on record.  Preliminary reports suggest there might have been as many as 80 tornadoes.

To put this in perspective, the Weather Channel's Jim Cantore said he found this statistic: Since 1986, the National Weather Service has issued 194 tornado warnings in November within the state of Illinois. 101 of those warnings, or more than half of them, were issued on Sunday.

Things are settling down in the Midwest, with no new bad storms expected.

Here in Vermont, we'll have a windy day, but showers will taper off. Temperatures will slowly fall, and it looks like we're in for a chilly week.

But no more disasters in the nation are forecast this week, thank Gawd.