Weather Imagery

The following is a list of record low temperatures for each of the 50 states and on what date that temperature occurred. These temperatures are official and don’t take into account wind chill. All these records are based on 2004 data:

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The following is a list of record high temperatures for each of the 50 states and on what date that temperature occurred. These temperatures are official and don’t take into account heat index. All these records are based on 2004 data:

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Tornadoes don’t really hop, jump or skip. They can pull back up into the clouds and come back down sometime later, but this usually occurs over a fairly large distance. On a smaller scale, people tend to believe tornadoes can hop or jump over one house while totally destroying the one next to it. While this is true that a tornado can completely destroy one house and minimally damage another right next to it, the real reason has nothing to do with a tornado jumping or skipping. It has to do with the internal structure and varying intensity of a tornado.

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With today’s land starved metropolitan cities expanding further into their rural surroundings, a strange consequence occurs that directly affects the local weather, in particular temperatures and rainfall. No, this doesn’t have anything to do with global warming. Instead, the principal involved has to do with how much of the sun’s energy is absorbed as compared to how much is reflected on a much smaller scale.

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In February 1971, Dr. T. Theodore Fujita published a research paper entitled “Proposed Characterization of Tornadoes and Hurricanes by Area and Intensity”. In the paper, he discussed how tornadoes should be rated on a scale to better understand the damage associated with intensity and wind speed. Over the next few years and the super outbreak of 1974, Dr. Fujita’s scale for measuring tornadoes became invaluable and the F-Scale became widely adopted.

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Hail forms in thunderstorms where the updraft is strong enough to carry water droplets and ice condensing nuclei high into the atmosphere where they interact and freeze turning into ice. When the weight of the ice is too heavy for the updraft to keep it suspended in the cloud or when the hail falls outside the updraft and is allowed to fall back to the ground, a hailstone is created.

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