Today the NWS released a statement confirming that an EF0 tornado (the weakest kind) hit about a mile east of Napavine, a small town in SW WA near I5 around 2 PM (2100 UTC) on Friday (see map):
The tornado touched the ground for a few hundred feet, damaging a barn, some fences and a few trees.
Here is a video of the scene:
Curious, the first thing I did was to check out the radar image (below). You can see a very strong line of convection...yellow indicates a real downpour.
But what about rotation? Any sign in the radar Doppler velocities (which they NEVER show on TV)? The colors in the image below for 2 PM indicate velocity towards or away from the radar (which in this case is just west of Portland). Rotation is shown by a couplet of warm and cold colors, warm colors (e.g., yellow) indicating flow moving away from the radar and cold colors (e.g., green) towards the radar). No sign of a velocity couplet.
This suggests a weak, non-supercell tornado. There can be some weak rotation near the surface (perhaps from air passing around a small terrain barrier) and the rotation gets "spun up" by the updraft of the convection. Sort of like a skater spinning up when she pulls her arms in (this is really based on the conservation of angular momentum).Typically Washington gets a few tornadoes a year and few of them are very damaging. The worst we have ever had was the EF3 Vancouver tornado in 1972.
KUOW Situation
Still waiting on them after I asked them to work with me on some type of compromise. Today their board chair put out a statement saying I decided to quit (not true) and that it was also the decision of the program manager, Jeff Hansen. Just gets stranger and stranger.
I think I was the only regular they had down there that was not allowed to speak on a variety of topics. Even stranger, I have talked to a number of other radio stations and NONE of them have said anything about constraining my speech. In fact, one news director laughed and said he WANTED me to talk about education topics--it would lend interest to the program. Why is KUOW different? Why is speech most constrained on a public radio station owned by the University of Washington?
If you are interesting in supporting this request for them to reinstate my weather segment here is the petition site: http://www.petitionbuzz.com/petitions/cliffmassonkuow
Facebook web site:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Put-Cliff-Mass-back-on-KUOW/149155005153152
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