Satellite Imagery Shows How Tornadoes Slashed Across Alabama, Mississippi

By Nancy Atkinson - May 2, 2011 at 9:53 PM UTC | Site News
Tornado-track.jpg

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Some extraordinary satellite and radar imagery shows how the deadly tornado supercell slashed through Alabama and Mississippi last week, as in the image above, leaving a gash of exposed ground and destruction that is visible from space. The latest reports indicate fatalities from the outbreak now exceed 342 people, and according to the Washington Post, this is the most people killed by tornadoes in a two-day period since April 5-6, 1936 when 454 people died. The image was taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite on April 28. See more imagery below.

[caption id="attachment_85337" align="aligncenter" width="537" caption="Part of the path of a 12-mile swath of destruction in Alabama from an EF4 tornado on April 27. Click to see the entire swath taken by a NOAA satellite. Credit: NOAA"]

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The National Weather Service said an EF4, with winds around 175 miles per hour, created a 12-mile-long track of destruction. This tornado caused more than 20 deaths.

[caption id="attachment_85339" align="aligncenter" width="452" caption="Radar sequence of tornado supercell thunderstorms that tracked from western Mississippi into southwest North Carolina. Credit: NCAR, Brian Tang. "]

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This image is pretty amazing: it is a radar montage of the supercell showing some of the 150 tornadoes that were reported on April 27 and 28, 2011. This cell traveled about 450 miles and lasted over 8 hours.

This animation from the NASA Earth Observatory team starts on April 26 and runs through the morning of April 28. It shows a relatively stable mass of cold air—visible as a swirl of more-or-less continuous clouds—rotates in the north along the top of the image, and meanwhile, moist air pushes north and west from the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. The two air masses collide and generate severe weather, but the bad weather also was amplified by the jet stream on April 27, which helped generate the lines of intense thunderstorms and tornadoes.

Sources:

NASA Earth Observatory,

Washington Post

, NOAA

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com