Tornado Warning For AccuWeather HQ!?

Before I went to bed Tuesday night around 9:30 PM, I noted some severe storms north and east of our location but judged that they were not close enough to warrant telling the family or dragging out the tripods and cameras on that hazy, hot and humid night. But at 10:05 I was awakened from my slumber by my wife - was in effect for Centre County, Pennsylvania, home of AccuWeather HQ and my house! I checked my cell phone for alerts from AccuWeather.com Messenger which confirmed what she had seen on TV.

A storm had formed in the eastern most part of the county and had a hook echo and rotational signatures on radar, but was no threat to us, in fact was far east of hear and heading southeast. This kind of illustrates a flaw in the current government warning systems that are employed by the Emergency Broadcast System television warnings and many websites, including AccuWeather.com. Below is what the warning looked like as seen through Google Earth. Note that the actual "polygon" warning was only a small slice of Centre County, far to the east of any major cities, including the city of State College.

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The NWS [JessePedia] actually issues each Tornado Warning for two different areas. Most services use the official older "county" warnings which are unable to distinguish where the tornado actually is. This is the "better safe than sorry" method, but out west, where counties are huge, it can set off a lot of false alarms. As the government phases out the old method and makes the new one official later this year, you will see a lot of services switch to the new "polygon" warnings for accuracy's sake. AccuWeather has services which have used the "polygon" warnings since their inception 4-5 years ago, including AccuWeather.com RadarPlus for consumers and AccuWeather SelectWarn for businesses (in the case of the former, neither the Tornado Warning nor warnings of lightning or heavy rain were transmitted because my street address was not within the threat area).

Above is the radar image from the time of the warning - note the hook echo and tornadic signature (red triangle) in eastern Centre County. Click here to download radar movies from RadarPlus showing the storm, including velocity and lightning strikes, playable in Quicktime. Click below to see a "lightning track" showing where thousands of lightning strikes hit the ground, with Centre County roads overlaid.

So far the only damage reports are of trees down near Renovo and Woodward, which were in the path of the storm. If the NWS investigates the storm damage tomorrow, I'll let you know what they say.