UPDATE: A couple of my blog readers pointed out that I had the arrows going the wrong way on the velocity radar below; this has been fixed. The NEXRAD radars list droplets moving away from the radar as positive values, which is a counter-intuitive feature of the Doppler Effect and I will be explaining this more in my blog Thursday.

More information is available today regarding the Mississippi Tornado that I blogged about on Saturday. CNN says that 10 people were killed as the twister tore up the state including devastating Yazoo City, MS. The NWS says that the tornado is initially rated EF-4, had a path of 97 miles, and a maximum width of 1.75 miles. Take a moment to picture this... find a local mountain or drive almost two miles in your car, then imagine a tornado that size. I've pulled some additional radar data from the storm... below is the Storm-Relative Velocity image as it moved over Yazoo City.

The severe thunderstorm containing the tornado had a huge signature of rotating winds (red is towards, blue away from, the radar, fill in the other arrows and you see the circulation (hover over image to remove arrows or download original).

Mike Smith, CEO of WeatherData (an AccuWeather Company) also pointed out that the bizarre "question mark" signature that AccuWeather.com's Level II Radar showed (which I posted on Saturday and is repeated below) was actually the debris (trees, houses, dirt and whatever else the monster could pick up) being hoisted in the air.

Despite the tragedy, we can take solace in some things. Mike calls it "The Mississippi Miracle", saying that without modern advances in warning systems such as Doppler Radar and Storm Chasers, the death toll would have been a lot higher. Something else to think about is location -- imagine if the storm had struck Jackson (just 40 miles to the southeast), where the population is 174,000 instead of 15,000.

Unfortunately there are several hoax photos making the rounds via email, the web, Twitter and Facebook. These would be labeled "Repurposed" and in the second case "Misdescribed" under the Photo Hoax Types which I listed in my blog last month. The first was a tornado from Illinois in 2004 shown on DailyWorldBuzz.com; the second was a wall cloud from Iowa placed on SevenSidedCube.Net(observe caution when clicking on those links - both sides are so ad-laden that they may in fact be fake websites erected with the soul purpose of fooling search engine users to read their false information). In reality, the tornado was rain-wrapped and hard to see, as Mike's blog shows with these video links.

Here are some radar loops to download:Base Reflectivity (AVI | Composite With Storm Tracks) | Velocity (Zoomed) These may require "Save As" for Internet Explorer and Quicktime or Windows Media Player with TechSmith Codec to play.

Some of the images from my blog have been used in this new video on AccuWeather.com:

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/9525098001?isVid=1

Report a Typo