Rolling Fork, 2023

Opens HookEcho on KDGX at 2023-03-25 00:05:00 UTC and loads the archived volumes for that day. The archive goes back to 1991.

Just after eight in the evening on 24 March 2023, an EF4 tornado went through Rolling Fork, Mississippi, a town of about 1,900 people. It stayed on the ground for nearly sixty miles. Seventeen people died in Mississippi that night.

What the radar shows. The link opens on correlation coefficient from Brandon. The debris ball is unmistakable — a circle of very low CC riding along with the reflectivity hook, which is the radar detecting a town in the air. Switch to velocity and the couplet is tight and deep; switch to reflectivity and the hook is the shape this app is named after.

Rolling Fork is a case worth replaying slowly, because it shows how much of the warning decision comes from products other than the picture of rain.

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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