re: Severe Weather: May 19-20, 2025

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Spann is as confused as I am that today wasn't a lot worse.

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I'm going with that it's just been getting too warm consistently lately, summerlike, and we typically don't have severe tornadic days in the summer.
Maybe if this setup happened just a month ago....

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Maybe

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I got caught at Buccees when the thing hit. I only live 5 minutes from there and thought I could get diesel and get back home before the shite hit the fan.

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I got caught at Buccees when the thing hit. I only live 5 minutes from there and thought I could get diesel and get back home before the shite hit the fan.

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Yeah, you were damn close. Glad it missed you and hope you didn't have any damage. Our lights blinked once or twice, but power stayed on. Barely had any rain from that storm or the one behind it. I watched it from just a couple miles away until a really close lightning strike ran me inside.

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It's always seemed to me that a pretty strong cold front is needed to trigger the really bad stuff. Along with some other factors.
The cool front behind this line probably isn't strong enough.
Temp drops in my area are predicted to only be about 10 degrees.

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There was some stuff going on with the midlevels that kind kept the ceiling a little lower on this one. Shear was also lacking a bit in the early part of today's setup. Once the LLJ ramped up into the evening those storms coming out of MS and into AL got a good boost. By then, though, it was a pretty messy storm mode. Thankfully, nothing had a whole lot of room to work and it was more of a whack-a-mole situation with tornadoes dropping here and there. There was a brief time with the lead storm when it was nearly out of Limestone county that things opened up to the south and the trailing storm lifted north a little that allowed it to maximize the LLJ and really wrap up. That kind coincided with the hail core collapsing and a big burst of RFD that eventually helped wrap that storm up as it moved into Madison. Then, the meso cranked, the hail core built again, and Huntsville got the worst of that core. That storm cycled again, and by the time it made it to NE Madison county it had changed structure completely. It and the trailing storm more or less merged, and it became an embedded supercell. It developed kind of stout rear inflow notch that would lead to another tornado, and actually two tornadoes at once as it started to exit Madison county.

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I lived in the area for 45 years. The major tornadoes almost always hit the same places, while other areas never get touched.
HighCotton mentioned Anderson Hills. I knew a guy that lived there, that got his house totally demolished twice.

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That's interesting, I live in PA, certainly not Tornado Alley, but the area directly around our house has had tornados a few times over the years. In 1998 a F2 and F4 tore through our neighbor's property over a three period, last August a F1 destroyed our neighbor's barn, and last month we had a funnel cloud pass over our house, but didn't touch down. We did lose some trees in that storm.

Edit: And we live in the mountains of PA, the highest point in PA is about 6 miles from our house.

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before it started really spinning

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Most of that front seemed like it was rotating by the time it got close to Athens.

For those interested, the London, Kentucky tornado from a few days ago that impacted a poster's neighborhood has been officially rated an EF4.

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The complete survey report will be out later today.

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Models needs to be better.

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I've noticed this that last 5+ years. The day to day weather models are atrocious. But the severe, tropical, and winter weather models are amazing.

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As of 7:00 AM today, rain chances in BR were down to 14% at the most this afternoon. I watered my lawn for 90 minutes
Models needs to be better.

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12z (6am) HRRR valid at 1pm:


12z (6am) NAM valid at 1pm:


Any app that gives you hourly rain percentages will be varying degrees of shite. Learn to use actual models for yourself.

NWS Huntsville has finished the preliminary ratings for the first of the Limestone and Madison county tornadoes.

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The one Reed drove into was rated a 125mph EF2. So, not really the 200mph monster that Reed made it out to be. No injuries or fatalities on any of these, thank goodness.

I saw some of the damage today and talked to a girl at a gas station where a bunch of chasers had congregated. She said multiple chasers got pulled over by police and were given tickets for driving like idiots. I saw one of those for myself yesterday as the storms were still in progress. They got pulled over just down the road from us.