Storms on the radar · May 31, 2013
El Reno, 2013
Opens HookEcho on KTLX at 2013-05-31 23:05:00 UTC and loads the archived volumes for that day. The archive goes back to 1991.
The El Reno tornado of 31 May 2013 was 2.6 miles wide, the widest ever measured. It killed eight people, including three storm chasers — the first chaser deaths in a tornado in the history of the pursuit.
What the radar shows. The link opens on storm-relative velocity from Twin Lakes, about 40 miles east. Subtracting the storm’s own motion is the whole point: it separates rotation from translation, and what is left is a couplet that widens and accelerates over consecutive volumes rather than tracking neatly along one line. The tornado repeatedly turned and expanded faster than the radar’s five-minute update could describe.
This is the case that made a generation of chasers stop treating a radar signature as a position and start treating it as a five-minute-old estimate of one.
Archive volumes come from NOAA's public NEXRAD archive on AWS, the same source the National Weather Service publishes. Nothing here is a re-render of someone else's picture.
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