1925-03-18 - Tri State Tornado - "Lost" photos found.

[Scott Sims]

My local paper(The Southern Illinoisan) had an article this weekend commemorating the 85th anniversary of the Tri-State Tornado. A local family had a few "lost" photo's of the damage aftermath included with the article.

The PAH-WFO has a good page summarizing the big points of the most deadly US tornado on record.

[Kate Pfeister]

Hi neighbor (Carbondale!)

very cool, thanks for putting them up... Going to pick up a copy tonight.

[joel ewing]

I've been chasing storms for almost 7 months now, and have learned a lot in that short time. I don't care what anybody else says....I'm convinced that the Tri-State Tornado was just a landspout.

[Shawn Schuman]

I wasn't sure where to put this, but this seemed to be the most logical place. I've been working on a blog post about the Tri-State tornado and I put together this map of surface conditions at 18z, or about an hour before the tornado touched down. I see a new paper was just published from the reanalysis project, which is excellent timing, because now I can check it out and see how far off the mark I am.

Anyway, here's the map:



The warm front was lifting north at the time, and by the time the tornado struck temps ranged from low to upper 60s, with dews generally from mid-50s to low 60s. Many areas only saw a couple hours of sunshine between the stratiform rain in the early morning and the outbreak after noon. The tornado obviously formed rather close to the sfc low, probably just on the cool side of the warm front, and stayed in pretty much the same relative location until it eventually got too far out ahead and ran into cooler air in southwest Indiana. Seems to have been a pretty textbook high-shear, low-CAPE day. The rest of the outbreak was quite impressive as well, and probably substantially larger than we know.

[Elaine Spencer]

Don't know if anyone else has seen this article I just stumbled across from the Electronic Journal of Severe Storms Meteorology:

http://www.ejssm.org/ojs/index.php/e...le/view/114/88

The authors conclude that no single factor seems to explain why the tornado so was long-lived and so violent -- the parent low pressure area/storm system wasn't unusually intense. However, they turned up evidence that a sharp dryline was in play, that the tornado formed very close to the triple point, and that the dryline/cold front/warm front moved along at just the right pace to keep the parent supercell in a favorable tornadic environment for an extended period.

[Mike Smith]

Hi Elaine, I read the entire article and parts of it twice. It is an excellent article and they did great forensic work. That said, I believe the available data -- 80 years later -- is not sufficiently fine-grained to help us understand why that tornado was so devastating and long-lived.

It is not at all surprising to me that the tornado was near the warm front. But, I suspect the helicity was actually much higher than they were able to discern from the limited data.

[Zack Hargrove]

Hi Elaine, I read the entire article and parts of it twice. It is an excellent article and they did great forensic work. That said, I believe the available data -- 80 years later -- is not sufficiently fine-grained to help us understand why that tornado was so devastating and long-lived.

It is not at all surprising to me that the tornado was near the warm front. But, I suspect the helicity was actually much higher than they were able to discern from the limited data.

My graduate adviser is actually Dr. Matthew Gilmore who has been a huge part of this project. He's been working hand in hand with Maddox on this study for a while. Its amazing how little actual research has been done on the Tri-State tornado. The simulation side of this project is actually what I'm working on for my Master's thesis. We are using the 20th century reanalysis data and have an ensemble of 56 members we are simulating using WRF-ARW. The 56 members were developed simply using surface pressure obs (the whole idea of 20CR - which has shown to have surprisingly accurate results from previous simulations). Initial results have produced a few runs with supercell(s) in the correct area and I have just started the actual analysis. We will be nesting the best storms down to around 100 meters eventually and we plan to analyze the heck out of them, including trajectory analyses. As you said, it will be tough to ever know for sure what the parameters were for that day, but we should have some interesting results from the simulation part of the project. I am hoping to get a first paper submitted by the end of this summer.