Storms on the radar · May 20, 2013
Moore, 2013
Opens HookEcho on KTLX at 2013-05-20 20:20:00 UTC and loads the archived volumes for that day. The archive goes back to 1991.
An EF5 tracked 14 miles through Newcastle, Oklahoma City and Moore on the afternoon of 20 May 2013, killing 24 people, including seven children at Plaza Towers Elementary.
What the radar shows. Moore sits about 20 miles from Twin Lakes, which is close to the best case for a WSR-88D: the beam is still low enough to sample the circulation itself rather than the storm’s mid-levels. The velocity couplet is tight, deep and obvious, and the debris signature on correlation coefficient follows the damage path almost tile for tile.
Compare this volume with Joplin’s, 90 miles from its radar, and you have the argument for why range matters more than almost anything else in radar interpretation.
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.
Comments
Threads live in GitHub Discussions. Signing in uses your GitHub account — we never see a password, and there is nothing to create.