Mayfield and the quad-state, 2021

Opens HookEcho on KPAH at 2021-12-11 04:35:00 UTC and loads the archived volumes for that day. The archive goes back to 1991.

A supercell that formed in northeast Arkansas late on 10 December 2021 stayed tornadic across four states. Mayfield, Kentucky lost its downtown a little after ten at night, local time; the outbreak killed 89 people, most of them in Kentucky.

What the radar shows. The link opens on correlation coefficient from Paducah, close by. CC is the product that tells you something is not rain: it drops where the beam is full of unlike things, and lofted building debris is as unlike as it gets. The hole in CC sitting on the velocity couplet is a tornado debris signature, and here it is unusually deep and unusually persistent.

Two things make this case worth replaying. It was at night, so radar was the only thing anyone had. And it was December — the setup was a winter storm system, which is why “tornado season” is a misleading phrase.

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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