Weather
By Dan Skeldon
Tropical Storm Elsa is long gone, so we can finally “let it go” when it comes to worrying about any additional impacts from an early in the season tropical threat. Windswept torrential downpours resulted in 1 to 3 inches of rain throughout South Jersey, a good soaking but not enough to cause any major flooding concerns. Elsa was also a quick hitter, lasting less than 8 hours with most of the action overnight while we slept, or perhaps tried to as the wind and rain kept you up. That quick movement didn’t allow a long enough period of onshore winds to create tidal flooding issues, not to mention that the worst part of the storm conveniently struck at low tide. So while Elsa did pack a punch in some minds, it makes sense that others in South Jersey either slept through the storm, or weren’t all that impressed with what Elsa had to offer. Even my friend, meteorologist Tom Lamaine, texted me “May all storms that pass this close to the Jersey shore leave with such relatively minimal effects.”
Now there are always exceptions to the rule, and there certainly were with Elsa as well. When any tropical system interacts with land, there is typically the potential for brief tornadoes to spin up as tropical rain bands pivot inland off of the ocean. And that’s the reason you may have been suddenly awoken by alerts on your cell phone for tornado warnings late Thursday night. As a side bar, one of the most valuable weather benefits of technology is the ability to send automatic alerts to all cell phones when tornado (or flash flood) warnings are issued, no matter what time of day. Before this option was available, there was no effective way at alerting those sleeping of potential life-threatening weather. Well, there is the NOAA weather radio, which most meteorologists and mariners few others have but few others even know exist, but I digress.
There are two methods for issuing a tornado warning. The first is the more straightforward one, when a tornado is spotted and confirmed to be on the ground, usually by law enforcement or a storm spotter network. Of course, we don’t have quite the extensive network that they have in tornado alley, given how rare tornadoes are here. Not to mention that these warnings were issued at night, when spotting a tornado is even more difficult. The other way revolves around our weather radars, which can actually “x-ray” a thunderstorm and analyze if a given thunderstorm has rotation up in the cloud and if so, determine how strong that rotation is. When a tornado warning is issued based on radar, there is no confirmation that a twister is on the ground. Rather, it is possible that a tornado may have touched down, or could spin up at any time. This second method is how almost all tornado warnings, what few we have, are issued in South Jersey.
We’ve all heard the line “if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Similarly, if a tornado touches down at night and there is no one around to see it, did it actually touch down? Well, there’s a way to find out, and it involves a team of meteorologists that survey any areas of concentrated damage that result from a thunderstorm’s winds and any “possible” tornado. Sure enough, such a team was on the ground in South Jersey the day after Elsa strike, surveying three areas where damage was focused and tornadoes were believed to have been the culprit. One was in Little Egg Harbor, one in Woodbine, and one on the causeway between Somers Point and Longport.
So what do they look for? It’s actually quite interesting, at least it is to a meteorologist who has tagged along on some of these. Essentially, they analyze the scope of the damage, look at what was impacted, and perhaps most importantly, the direction the damage came from. Let’s say a storm hits a clump of trees and all the trees are blown over in the same direction. The determination would be straight-line winds. If a few trees were knocked over and facing south, a few others east, and several others to the west, that would indicate rotational damage and a tornado was the likely culprit.
Findings from Elsa’s damage determined that two tornadoes did indeed touch down that Thursday night, one in Little Egg Harbor with winds of 80mph and one in Woodbine with winds of 100mph. On the Route 152 causeway, 7 wooden power poles snapped due to the wind, but all fell in the same direction, hence no tornado. Yet the winds were still determined to be 100mph, which stresses that whether 100mph winds blow in a circle or a straight line, they can be destructive and deadly. Thankfully, they were only the former and not the latter this time.
Hurricane season runs through November 30. So let’s hope an early season storm in July is all we see this year, and not a sign of things to come when the tropics really heat up in September.
Meteorologist Dan Skeldon has a degree in meteorology from Cornell University. He has forecasted the weather in South Jersey for the last 18 years, first on the former television station NBC40 and then on Longport Media radio. Dan has earned the American Meteorological Society Seal of Approval for Broadcast Meteorologists, and now does television broadcasts on WFMZ-TV in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley.
