Answers to your tornado questions: Andy Parker explains science of GI twister

By Karen Carr Keefe

Senior Contributing Reporter

When a tornado touched down along West River Road on Grand Island at 4:33 p.m. Sept. 9, it raised the questions, “Why us?” and “Why here?”

Luckily for Grand Islanders, meteorologist Andy Parker tracked the tornado and has scientific answers to those questions.

Parker, a former WKBW-TV Channel 7 meteorologist, now provides meteorological analysis of weather/climate data throughout Western New York.

He explains why and how Grand Island had the first tornado in the town’s collective memory.

First, the ‘where’ and ‘how’

Parker described the path of Grand Island’s tornado on Sept. 9.

He said he first got wind of the potential storm when Canadian trackers put out alerts that there was rotation detected on their side of the border.

The tornado appeared just south of Navy Island, Parker said.

“We started looking at Doppler radar and we could identify where that was – and it was just on the other side of West River. Then, shortly after that, it hopped the (Niagara) River, and that’s when first contact was made right on the west side of Grand Island,” Parker said. “After that, it continued on the ground for about a mile, and it was an EF-0, so you had winds between 65 and 85 mph.”

Parker said the damage path was less than a football field wide, and the tornado wasn’t on the ground for long – three minutes, to be exact. The estimated peak winds were 85 mph in what was officially termed a “tornadic waterspout” by the National Weather Service.

“The swirl pulled back up into the cloud and you could see the base was still rotating. So, the rotation was then aloft up in the clouds. We captured it on a camera that was over at the South Grand Island Bridge,” Parker said.

He said, at that point, it was still evident that there was still a swirl in the atmosphere.

Parker said the tornado left only minor property damage in its wake, such as windows broken and branches down.

Next, the ‘how’

There have been a record nine tornados in Western New York this season, and a record 31 tornadoes in New York state.

“This year is very easy to point out the reason for the uptick in tornadic activity,” Parker said. “It was all kind of tied to the remnants of Hurricane Beryl.”

Beryl barreled and bullied its way through parts of the Caribbean, the Yucatán Peninsula, and the Gulf Coast of the U.S. in late June and early July.

“That was the one that sparked off a number of tornados. If you remove that kind of singular event – that anomaly – New York doesn’t break a record and it turns out to be kind of an average, or slightly above average year – but not a record-breaker. That one event pushed it over the top,” Parker said.

“The path that the remnants (of Beryl) took and the timing of it really set the stage for an uptick in tornadic activity,” he said.

One county bucked the trend, though. There were no tornados in Niagara County this year, Parker said, despite the incidence of a warning or a funnel in all the other counties in Western New York.

Comparison with past tornado activity

Parker said that, to compare the number of tornados now, vs. that of the 1950s or earlier, you have to factor in two big changes: the great strides in the technology that tracks and measures tornadic activity, and population growth into areas that are tornado-prone.

It could be akin to the old adage, “If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?”

Parker took a look at then and now, pointing out that when more people are looking more effectively for tornados, they are likely to see more tornados. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that there are more of them.

“If you look at the population distribution of the ’50s, you look at how many eyeballs were there, spread out across the same amount of area. How many cameras were there, spread out across the area? The ability for people to communicate what they saw to outlets or to the weather service,” Parker observed. “It’s a completely different environment now – a very connected environment,” and one in which you can document more than what was previously possible.