- Wow, it's hard to believe what we just
witnessed today. As expected, storms went up and we targeted
the best area, near El Reno. instead of individual storms, they
formed an east west line of embedded supercells, which didn't
look encouraging at first, but then really got organized. We
saw a tornado touch down in a field near the El Reno airport,
then get obscured from our location by rain. As we crept east
along Interstate 40, we spotted something remarkable. A huge
tornado, so big that it barely fit in the viewfinder of my camera!!
We were behind it, so our position was good, I could just keep
pace with it. I've never seen anything so big before.
-
- It eventually turned right and crossed
the highway ahead of us. This was a very complicated storm with
many areas of rotation and odd behavior. The large number of
storm chasers, regular traffic, downed trees & power lines
and other debris made this a challenging chase, to say the least!
-
- **Update** Many storm chasers had close
calls with this tornado due to its extreme size and odd motion.
Many got caught up in it and Unfortunately, 3 well respected
chasers/storm researchers were killed by it, including Tim Samaras
-
- **Update 2** The National Weather service
has upgraded the strength of the tornado and has given it and
EF-5 rating, the highest there is. Not only that, but the width
of the tornado was calculated to have been 2.6 miles wide (4.2
km)!! That makes it the world record holder for the largest tornado
ever documented!! The wind speed was measured by mobile doppler
radar at 296 mph (476 km/h)
-
- **Update 3** The rating of the tornado
has been dropped back down to EF-3. The RADAR data has been controvercially
rejected.
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