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The following are scanned radar images from the Shelby County Airport WSR-88D (KBMX)
just before and around the time of the Rainsville tornado.
The base reflectivity image in Figure 1 shows two thunderstorms moving over the southern part of Dekalb county
at 3:32 PM CDT. Figure 2 shows the Storm Relative Velocity (SRM) at the same time as Figure 1. The purple area in
Figure 2 denotes an area of bad data. This continued into the next several radar scans and is the only SRM
image from the KBMX radar available before the tornado event. The SRM image shows that the two
storms had rotation associated with them, the more pronounced rotation at this time was associated with STORM B.
Figure 3, a base reflectivity image, steps forward in time to 3:58 PM CDT, when the tornado was occurring in the Rainsville area.
The storms were moving northeast at about 40 mph in that area. Comparing the two reflectivity images and
viewing an animation of several images (not shown) indicates that STORM A was the storm
that moved northeast over Rainsville and STORM B moved over the Fort Payne area. The radar location is towards the lower
left hand corner of each image and the storm are approximately 90 miles from the radar site.
Figure 1 |
Figure 2 |
Figure 3 |
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