Oak Island / Southport, NC Tornadoes April 13

As part of the Easter 2020 Tornado Outbreak, two small twisters touched down near Southport, North Carolina. The first was a waterspout that made landfall on Oak Island, where I spent nearly ever summer of my life. In fact, it was not far from the house I stayed in there in July 2018.

I gathered photos and videos from the Oak Island group on Facebook and found that there was a larger path of tree damage farther inland, between the two tornado tracks. I discuss all of that in the video above.

Ultimately, you can see the track of the storm with the downed trees, but it's unlikely there was tornadic activity in between, or there would have been structural damage. We'll probably never know for sure, only a drone survey to examine the directions in which the trees fell could say for sure. It's worth noting that there was little damage and no high wind reports in the area of heaviest rotation, shown in orange. This likely indicates that the rotation had lifted off the ground by that time.

For official information, and details on the two tornado tracks, please access the NWS-Wilmington report, which was written in part by my college buddy Tim Armstrong. It also covers additional tornadoes in the Carolinas that day.

The most compelling amateur video of the storm was taken by Frank Bellini on Facebook on the canal, just northeast of landfall, and shows what is likely a dissipating waterspout or thunderstorm downburst winds.

I first noticed the storm's track approaching the coast that morning before the tornado warning was issued. The storm was moving extremely fast, at 70 mph according to the tornado warning. Before I could even react, it was onshore and I tweeted a radar image.

On the left, the radars "rotational track" is annotated with an arrow to show the direction. On the right, a look at the hook echo on radar reflectivity and what we call the "velocity couplet" indicating rotation. Full loops are available below.

In order to hand-draw the areas of rotation captured by the radar, I used this MRMS Rotational Track image, which is essentially a lower-res version of what I posted above, but which comes with a local map.

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