Tornado family
A tornado family is a series of tornadoes spawned by the same supercell.[1] These families form a line of successive or parallel tornado paths and can cover a short span or a vast distance. Tornado families are sometimes mistaken as a single continuous tornado, especially prior to the 1970s. Sometimes the tornado tracks can overlap and expert analysis is necessary to determine whether or not damage was created by a family or a single tornado.[2] In some cases, different tornadoes of a tornado family merge, making discerning whether an event was continuous or not even more difficult.
Some tornado damage remains a mystery even today due to a lack of evidence. The Tri-State Tornado was one such tornado. It could either have been the longest single tornado recorded or a family of tornadoes. New re-analyses suggest that it was one continuous tornado,[3] however, many other very long track tornado events were later found to be tornado families, notably the Woodward, Oklahoma tornado family of April 1947 and the Charleston-Mattoon, Illinois tornado family of May 1917.
Tornado families can be a result of satellite tornadoes, cyclic tornadogenesis, or some combination thereof. Intense downbursts may also cause damage paths to appear continuous, although this was more an issue for historic tornadoes.
References [edit]
- ^ A Comprehensive Glossary of Weather Terms for Storm Spotters
- ^ Doswell, Charles A., III; D. W. Burgess (1988). "On Some Issues of United States Tornado Climatology". Mon. Wea. Rev. 116 (2): 495–501. doi:10.1175/1520-0493(1988)116<0495:OSIOUS>2.0.CO;2.
- ^ Doswell, Charles A., III; C. Crisp, R.A. Maddox, J. Hart, R.H. Johns, M.S. Gilmore, D.W. Burgess, Steve Piltz. "The Tri-State Tornado of 18 March 1925 Reanalysis Project: Preliminary Results" (Powerpoint Presentation). Archived from the original on 2008-03-07. Retrieved 2008-03-09.
- The Tornado Project (1999). The Tornado Project's Terrific, Timeless and Sometimes Trivial Truths about Those Terrifying Twirling Twisters!
