Tornado Hits Near NYC (Tappan Zee)

A tornado was sighted Wednesday afternoon over the Hudson river just north of New York City. WCBS has video of the funnel and debris on a webcam, and you can see photos and video at NY1.com, BuffaloNews.com.

First, a radar shot from the tornado yesterday, which actually began as a waterspout* on the Hudson River at the famous 3-mile long Tappan Zee Bridge (Google has high-res satellite imagery of the bridge if you want to check out this marvel of engineering).

The image above is a storm-relative velocity image, showing the "couplet" of blue next to red that one looks for to see rotation (more on that later today). The red colors indicate extreme wind velocities away from the NYC radar; the blue mean extreme winds towards the radar. Put the two together and you see that circulation must be occurring. This radar image was snapped just before the funnel was sighted (see below).

The JournalNews/LoHud site says that a police officer was injured when "his patrol car was picked up by the funnel and flipped around several times." 5,000 people lost power, two others were injured, and a building collapsed in Hawthorne. The article goes on to quote one of the mets here:

The townspeople of Sleepy Hollow, NY said there has never been a tornado there in recorded history. TornadoProject.com lists only 6 tornadoes in Westchester County history.

Other Radar Images & Movies:

*Calling it a waterspout depends on which definition of "waterspout" you subscribe to. Some people consider any tornado over water to be a waterspout; others believe that waterspouts only describe weak tornadoes which form over water in non-convective situations. Wikipedia would classify this as a "tornadic waterspout" because it was associated with a mesocyclone, but not a supercell thunderstorm.