Often the true extent of damage is not known until the disaster survey team can inspect the damage the next day. It was relatively cool, humid, and cloudy; Harrisburg was northeast of the surface warm front. Rated F5 by Grazulis as two farms were swept away. May 31, 1985 changed my life forever. Beach, National Centers The pink shading in the following sounding from Pittsburgh, PA at 7PM May 31st [00Z June 1st] (courtesy Paul Markowski) is an estimation of the Convective Available Potential Energy or CAPE in the atmosphere. Over the past 21-22 years, I have also worked in Birmingham, AL, Blacksburg, VA, and now as a Lead Forecaster in Columbia, SC. Keep in mind that this F4 was on the ground for over 60 miles. Greg Forbes, myself, Fred [Gadomski], and Paul [Knight] were mesmerized by the radarand, out of the dead silence, Greg pronounced that "People are dying right now." . This tornado is officially rated F4; however, the Polish Weather Service estimated winds at 246 to 324mph (396 to 521km/h), potentially ranking it as an F5. I worked 3-11 shift at the local hospital in Greenville PA. Officially rated F4, this tornado struck the farmstead near Marion, North Dakota causing extreme damage. Winds WSW at 10 to 20 mph. This was about the only structure untouched. Each red triangle is the location of a tornado that caused EF5 or F5 damage. Those lost never will be forgotten. Twenty-one tornadoes tracked across Northeast Ohio and Northwest Pennsylvania during the evening of May 31st. What he saw in storm surveys was almost unimaginable. An F3 tornado caused significant damage in northern Trumbull and southern Ashtabula Counties. For much of the area, this Friday was the last day of the school year, but by early afternoon it felt more like the middle of July than the end of May. The F5 rating was replaced by EF5 under the new Enhanced Fujita Scale. Tornadoes are among the most violent known meteorological phenomena. Dr. Forbes subsequently investigated and found tornado damage in Hollenback Township, Luzerne County. THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN ERIE HAS ISSUED A TORNADO WARNING UNTIL 530 PM FOR THESE COUNTIES IN NORTHWESTERN PENNSYLVANIASOUTHERN ERIE A TORNADO WAS SIGHTED BY STATE POLICE NEAR PENNSIDESOUTH OF ALBION IN ERIE COUNTY AT 505 PMMOVING TOWARD THE NORTHEAST AT 30 MILES AN HOUR. Disaster aid poured in. We were spared but others were not so lucky. The fast eastward movement of the cold front is an indication of how strong (fast) winds aloft were blowing that day. We also were concerned for the Williamsport area. There was a great deal of damage north of Corry, but no one was seriously hurt. I think it was around 5:00 PM when the Penn State WSR-74C radar starting showing returns (quickly strong ones) from Erie County which was at the edge of the 230-kilometer scan. Markowski, Paul: The Tornado Outbreak of May 31, 1985: Looking Back at One of Pennsylvanias Deadliest Weather Events. At least 695 . However, as the afternoon progressed, the thunderstorm activity developed south into northern Ohio. Cars flipped around every which way. Thats just one reason why the 1985 outbreak was so shocking. Meanwhile, a cold front was tracking across the Midwest. Then-Gov. ANOTHER TORNADO SOUTH OF SPARTANSBURG MOVING INTO WARREN COUNTY AND ONE NORTH OF OIL CITY MOVING INTO NORTHERN FOREST COUNTY. The Ohio-Pennsylvania Tornadoes of May 31, 1985. That went on continuously for many hours. That was the end of the convection for the evening and just as suddenly as the event started, it was over. In spring 1993 I had the opportunity to drive through the path of the Moshannon tornado with fellow Penn Stater and NWS forecaster Bill Gartner. The storm paralleled I-80, so a track a bit further south would have been a disaster. I remember about 4:00-4:30 in the afternoon a few coming into the Penn State weather station to check on whether the anticipated severe weather outbreak had gotten going. It can be a scary experience when . Two large homes were completely swept away. Thomas P. Grazulis Ted Fujita), or meteorological research institutions (i.e. And it is hard to tell the difference among them all, but I would say in terms of destruction, just total devastation, this is the worst I have seen." . Noted as "possibly F5" by Grazulis. An EF5 tornado is the strongest designation a tornado can receive. Sleptzoff & T. Dunkle (2009). BTORNADOESLARGE HAILDANGEROUS LIGHTNINGAND DAMAGING THUNDERSTORM WINDS ARE POSSIBLEIN THESE AREAS. Not much really happened through the day. A large ranch home and farms were swept away. The tornado intensified to an F5 as it tracked east across southern Trumbull County devastating the communities of Newton Falls and Niles. The diverse air masses clearly have a whole lot to do with igniting the supercell thunderstorms that are the source of some of the most dangerous tornadoes, but indicting those ingredients alone would be a gross oversimplification, according to the Storm Prediction Center. PORTIONS OF CENTRAL AND EASTERN LAKE ERIE This area is very hilly terrain and the tornado did not skip from one hill to the next, but went right down into the valley and up the other side for a far as the eye could see. Tragically, the tornadoes hit where people live. It brought home just how quickly and tragically a tornado can change lives. My hometown was Ravenna, OH and Iremember playing ball outside with my sister in our yard and wondering why it was so hot andhumid. Heflipped on the scanner and I was listening to it also and hearing him pace back and forth. 10 violent (F4 or F5) tornadoes; 12 killer tornadoes 89 fatalities (65 in Pa.; 69 tornado deaths in Pa. in previous 50 years) Damage estimated in excess of $600 million ($1.5 billion in. My coworker had called at 4 PM. We had colder air aloft movingover the western Great Lakes with a jet max rotating around the south side of the approaching trough. They want you back in, she shouted over the mower. All buildings and machinery were swept away from a farm. As McKean County was put under a tornado warning, I remember broadcasting with more urgency in my voice than ever before that this was not a typical tornado warning. Tornadoes get their spin when winds blow in different directions in a column of air. 34 years ago today in my hometown of Niles, Ohio, this F5 tornado killed nine people. The work of tornado expert Thomas P. Grazulis revealed the existence of several dozen likely F5 tornadoes between 1880 and 1995. Few visible scars remain of that Friday night in 1985. The odds against that happening in those areas are incalculable," said Harold Brooks, senior scientist at that National Severe Storms Laboratory. BULLETIN--IMMEDIATE BROADCAST REQUESTED Unfortunately, the tornadoes that hit Warren, Forest and Venango Counties on that fateful night thirty years ago were very destructive in terms of property and life. One classic signature is called a hook echo. Additional Links. Resulting in 34 deaths, the Xenia tornado was the deadliest of all tornadoes from this outbreak and remains among the top 10 costliest U.S. tornadoes on record (approximately $250 million in 1974). Negative LI values generally indicate unstable atmosphere, positive indicate lesser instability. Please note that Figure 11 and the following figures do not depict actual radar observations, but rather hand-drawn depictions of the supercells by NWS meteorologists. 1985 Tornado Outbreak Revisited [PowerPoint presentation]. In 1987 we went on a family picnic with him to Parker Dam and he took me on a little road trip through Moshannon State Park. I was a grad student at Penn State during the Moshannon tornado outbreak on 31 May 1985. The cold front would later provide the trigger for explosive supercell thunderstorm development. The F4 tornado that went through Albion in southeast Erie County first touched down just west of the PA-OH border at 2059z (4:59 PM). I have worked for the National Weather Service for 15 years now and still love thepower of the atmosphere and probably always will! One farm appeared to show potential F5 damage to a home that was swept completely away. I lived in Camp Hill, just west of Harrisburg, so I was too far southeast to experience the storms firsthand. Mattresses from the homes were transported 2mi (3.2km). The following sounding is from Dayton, Ohio (DAY) the morning of the 31st. Registering F5 on the Fujita scale, it remains the only F5 in . Twenty-one tornadoes tracked across Northeast Ohio and Northwest Pennsylvania during the evening of May 31st. This list includes tornadoes believed or confirmed to have been at F5 or EF5 intensity. Many of the structures were reduced to bare foundations, leaving "no trace of lumber or contents." I relieved Bill Drzal who was the lead forecaster on the day shift, and Bill briefed me on the tornado potential. Apparently too many came into the small Penn State radar room to witness weather history because the room got so hot that radar overheated and shut down about the time the Moshannon tornado was ending. At any rate, the first storms associated with the outbreak in the United States formed just before our shift began on the 31st. Only about 20% of those supercells spawn tornadoes, and scientists arent sure why some do and some dont. In 30 years, a whole new generation has been born and has grown into adulthood. The vertical extent of the storm was astounding as it moved across. I had been home long enough to change into work clothes and mow between a few rows of Christmas trees before Isaw my wife at the time waving to me from the top of the hill. It was the only F5 twister in Pennsylvania history. Nature can be very, very powerful. Read More >, Tornadoes | Personal Stories | Meteorology | References & Links. Homes were swept away, with only a bathtub remaining on one of the foundations. Two violent F5 tornadoes destroyed much of Xenia and Sayler Park (a western suburb of Cincinnati) in Ohio. I will never forget the evening of May 31, 1985 and the events that occurred that night and during the next several weeks as the area of northwestern Pennsylvania where I live experienced a severe outbreak of several deadly tornadoes. There were also 82 injuries with a total of 309 buildings destroyed. Do you have a story to share? (1986) notes that the dynamics in place were strong since a sharp cold front (Figure 2, 3, 8 and 10) and an upper trough (Figure 4 and 5) was crossing Michigan, bringing with it strong westerlies in the upper-levels of the atmosphere. Some Midwestern counties have populations as low as one person per mile. This tornado was rated EF5 by the French Observatory of Tornadoes and Violent Thunderstorms (Keraunos), with the European Severe Storms Laboratory acknowledging the EF5 rating as its maximum intensity, though ESSL also rated the tornado F5. The tree coverage is very dense in the forest with deep shade even on sunny days. Unseasonably warm and humid air moved northward into Pennsylvania and much of the eastern U.S. ahead of the cold front, setting the stage for strong thunderstorms and tornadoes. PORTIONS OF EASTERN OHIO It was rated F4, traveled more than 60 miles across rough terrain, and at times had a damage path width of around 2 miles. In fact, a few were throwing a party that night. We assumed that this would be a dynamics drivenevent and the greatest dynamics were located closer to the surface low moving over Sault Saint Marie. The same supercell dropped another tornado right across the state line in Pennsylvania 15 minutes later and killed 9 people in Big Beaver, Pennsylvania. Yet here we were at 3:30 in the afternoon and not one shower had popped yet on the radar. My father always listened to the scanner at night and his room was across from mine. Atlantic was thoroughly devastated. Injuries were in the hundreds. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Figure 2 depicts the surface analysis on the morning of May 31st. Three farms were obliterated, with all buildings and several inches of topsoil swept away. On a personal note, my family had some connections to the affected area. We did, however, receive near real-time visible data satellite imagery on the center's (then) fairly new "CSIS" work stations. After issuing the early Convective Outlook, I went home to bed. According to Leduc, et al. May 31, 1985 was a Friday during the period between spring semester and summer session, but many graduate students remained in town working. According to the NWS Cleveland, OH (2019), before the NWS WSR 88-Doppler Radar, radar operators hand drew the radar echos on overlay maps. The increasing wind speed with height and change in direction, known as wind shear, is what helps thunderstorms to rotate and be capable of producing significant tornadoes. I do remember that the composite chart of all the "classic" severe weather parameters thatwe produced for every Outlook forecast showed that things were coming together in a fairlyclassic Central Plains-like manner. The first of two F4 tornadoes to affect the county touched down just west of the Pennsylvania state line around 5 p.m. Two barns were leveled and a pickup truck was carried .5mi (0.80km) through the air. It shows a pronounced hook echo (center of photo) within the storm moving through Moshannon State Forest about 20 miles north of State College, Centre County. One of them had traveled 65 miles through forestland, up and down deep slopes" just north of I-80, somehow dodging two structures. I graduated in 1993 from the University with my BS in Meteorology, and in August of 1993 I began my National Weather Service career in a small Weather Forecast Office in Wichita Falls, TX. Sorry, the location you searched for was not found. National Weather Service The second funnel cloud touched down at 6:50 p.m. and cut a half-mile wide swath through Hubbard Township, crossing into Pennsylvania and continuing its devastation through Wheatland, Hermitage and into Lackawannock Township. Farms were leveled and a truck was thrown 300yd (274m). The outbreak produced the only F5 tornado on record in the state's history. It was taken by a salesman from Erie who later gave his undeveloped film to Buhl Clarke of Hermitage. The 300mb level is about 30,000 feet above the ground. Tornado, in one of historys greatest detective feats, measured the immeasurable. As we travelled along the road, we broke out of the tree cover and came across the Moshannon State Park F4 tornado path that was over one mile wide. Later in the day I drove to as many areas as I could to see the destruction first hand and to meet with people and offer comfort and assure them that the state would do all it could to assist them. in meteorology from 1992-1996, and in the summer of 1995, worked at the National Severe Storms Lab and participated in the VORTEX project--at the time, the biggest tornado field project ever. In the weeks and months that followed, my legislative offices assisted people and communities obtain any state aid that was available. SOUTHERN LAKE ONTARIO "Splendid homes" were swept away and "reduced to splinters.". I worked the evening shift at "SELS" (the Severe Local Storms Unit of the National Severe Storms Forecast Center, as the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) was known in those days) on Friday, 31 May 1985. What happened next is historyhistorical damage and destruction. I served as assistant forecaster to lead forecaster Rich Anthony (now retired). Cochranton, Cherry Tree, Cooperstown and Tionesta were also hard hit. Decades later, despite remarkable technological advances, they still guard their secrets. A ten-block area was completely destroyed with nine people loosing their lives. Then, sirens. I was especially saddened to find out that our favorite ice cream stand in Tidioute PA had beendestroyed by the tornado that passed through that lovely little town. More than 10 tornadoes touched down in Ontario.

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