Here's a few grabs of the radar 20 Minutes before it hit Smithville MS rated an F5 today.
I was able to watch this entire event play out while at work. So I have lots of screen grabs of the days events. There were times I was speechless.

Below is a link to some video from "Dateline" last night, 4-29-11 about Storm Chasers by Brian Williams.

It was very nicely done, and Andy Gabrielson from MN again has more, superb, dramatic close-ups of a tornado.

What they failed to say is that chasers and spotters like Andy help save lives by reporting what they are seeing, so that NWS can get out timely warnings to the public on something that is actually happening. Why is this important? Because radar can't "see" a tornado, hail, wind, damage, flooding etc. We need someone on the ground to confirm that this is or is not happening, and, unfortunately, we all know what the general public does with warnings after "nothing happened".

And these spotters and chasers do all this voluntarily at their own expense and risk. Nothing to sneeze at with the price of gas and equipment!

Also, they failed to urge people to get weather radios that work when electricity goes out!

I like the fact that Jim Cantorie said they "needed to be below ground", as NWS recordings said, to survive those tornadoes on 4-27. If they only could have mentioned weather radios, maybe more lives could have been saved? Unfortunately basements are becoming scarce due to economical and geographical factors. Maybe we will have to designate lockers and safes as tornado shelters or build them for neighborhoods? Now isn't that a quaint idea!

Meredith

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"Storm chaser sobered by tornado

Meet 24-year-old Andy Gabrielson, a storm chaser, who talks about his latest pursuit - the deadly tornado in eastern Mississippi, which he considers to be one of the most dramatic that he has ever experienced."

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032600/vp/42829648#42829648

What a horrible, horrible outbreak. I haven't ever seen anything like what occurred last Wednesday. It appeared that nearly every single cell could have a tornado on it at one time or another. I was working and on the phone with customers down there all day. A guy from GA Power wanted me to rate the tornado severity for northern AL on a 1-10 scale...I obviously gave him a strong 10 with that set-up.

Here's an interesting article from Greg Forbes where he draws some comparison from this outbreak to the Superoutbreak of 1974:

Forbes Blog

I found this site this morning. It links to hi-res sat photos of the damage paths. Works best in Firefox. The images kept going blank in IE.

ngs.woc.noaa.gov/storms/apr11_tornado/

An article summarizing the current numbers...

http://www.accuweather.com/blogs/news/story/49198/noaa-releases-latest-april-27.asp

I'll just quote the whole article here because its pretty short... insane numbers!

The number of people missing is still pretty huge, hopefully its a poor estimate.

Those numbers are just unreal. Likely won't know the official number for a few months, considering it took FGF a few months to finalize their number for 6/17/10, and that outbreak was a fraction of what this one was.

Anyone see this?



Wow...

Neat NASA article... http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/06may_tornado/

If you haven't read Jon Davies analysis of the event I suggest you do so. He provides some enticing data.
http://davieswx.blogspot.com/2011_05_01_archive.html

Check out this graph...