Happy Monday and welcome to another edition of the Beyond The Forecast newsletter! It’s a bittersweet day for some folks in Franklin County as they look back at an EF-3 tornado that moved through two years ago.
The twister’s path was 8.2 miles long and 250 yards wide. It reached maximum wind speeds of 159 miles per hour and injured two people.
Recommended Videos
The National Weather Service (NWS) office in Blacksburg conducted the storm survey. You can read about the nitty-gritty details here.
The damage pictured in the header of this newsletter happened on Windy Ridge Road, north of Sydnorsville. Below, you see a modular home on Fishburn Mountain Road that was destroyed by the tornado.
Archived radar data shows exactly when the storm was moving through, around 10:30 a.m. on April 19, 2019.
The arrows point out the rotation couplet on velocity data in the upper right panel and the tornado debris signature on correlation coefficient data in the upper left panel.
This graphic also shows radar reflectivity in the lower right panel and sheer intensity in the lower left. Big thanks to the NWS Blacksburg for these images.
All of the radar products shown above should look familiar to you, as Your Local Weather Authority uses all of them during our severe weather coverage on 10 News.
The Franklin County tornado was not the only one to touch down that day! A weaker EF-1 tornado moved through Bedford County, near Thaxton, later that morning.
It uprooted and snapped some trees and destroyed an outbuilding on Centennial Road with its 93 mph winds.
The graphic below shows the path of both of the tornadoes from April 19, 2019. The red line denotes the EF-3 in Franklin County, while the green line is where the Thaxton tornado was.
We’ve been pretty lucky with severe weather so far this season, as there haven’t been any confirmed tornadoes. However, today’s tornado anniversary and the recent ones in the Lynchburg area, Pulaski County and Appomattox County should remind you that we absolutely have to be on our toes during the spring.
Switching gears to your forecast, the big system of the week is Wednesday’s cold front. It will bring some rain to our area, but the big impact will be the big drop in temperatures! Meteorologist Chris Michaels has a look at the weather whiplash we’re expecting in today’s forecast article.
You can always get specific forecast details for your zone, whether it’s the Roanoke Valley, the Lynchburg area, the New River Valley or elsewhere around Southwest and Central Virginia, anytime at WSLS.com/weather. Know your zone!
In case you missed it, we’re posting great weather and science content on WSLS.com. Here are a few links from the past week to check out:
If you prefer your weather information delivered by social media, you can follow Your Local Weather Authority on Facebook and Twitter.
You can also keep up with me on social media. I’m on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, follow along!
-- Justin McKee