Washington DC Tornado Video, Storm Photos
Severe thunderstorms occurred Wednesday afternoon in and around Washington, D.C. It was a complicated afternoon of conflicting reports, but I'm here to sort it out. A number of our readers caught some good storm footage and uploaded it to the AccuWeather.com Weather Photo Gallery. Here's a radar animation from AccuWeather.com RadarPlus:
DOWNLOAD HI-RES QUICKTIME MOVIE
Note that the DC area was affected by storms at 2:00, 3-4, and 7:00. This blog entry concentrates on the latter two storms.
Blog reader Randall who goes by DeptOneEleven on our Photo Gallery, uploaded this photo of hail at his parent's house in Herndon (red dot on this map).
He also uploaded this photo of debris in the road and downed power lines near Dulles International Airport (green dot on this map). Randall guesses that the debris came from the construction site, and he's probably right; high winds can easily turn construction site materials into damaging projectiles.
Here is the radar at 3:46 pm. Note the 60+ dBZ readings approaching Herndon (just NW of Reston). I assume this is the hail.
And although The SPC [JessePedia] says that it did not receive any tornado or funnel cloud reports that day (see map below), The NWS [JessePedia] said in this Tornado Warning at 4:17 PM, "STORM SPOTTERS REPORTED A TORNADO NEAR DULLES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT." The radar from that time is not too exciting. I apologize that I didn't save off the velocity radar data, that would have been helpful in all of this.
While I never saw any hook echoes on the radar around 7PM, there were some interesting things going on as a cell to the east merged with a bow echo coming down from the north. Check out this video of a possible tornado in the area
taken just before 7 PM by meteorologist Johnathan Beach. Ironically, witnesses described (no surprise) a green sky (see my post from earlier today). Here's a radar shot from that time:
Again, not much to see, but I did turn off echoes under 30 dBZ here, and weak tornadoes and waterspouts have been spotted with barely anything on radar. No Tornado Warning was issued, and as stated above, they received no spotter reports. It could not be a tornado I suppose; stranger things have happened (see the non-tornadic column of air on the right side of this photo from 2005 and read the entire storm report) but it sure looks like one.
A little further north in Felton, Pennsylvania, blog reader John took this video of winds whipping heavy rain off his front porch. Note that those red dots on the map above are Funnel Cloud reports just north of his location (he was under a Tornado Warning at the time). You can leave comments on the video or rate it in our Photo Gallery.
Report a Typo
