West Point, MS Night Tornado...

I just posted a 10-minute video of a really cool nighttime tornado near West Point, MS on October 18th 2004... It was such a crazy/lucky experience!!! We were only under a See Text that day by the SPC, mainly as I remember due to a strong cap... There was actually 28 tornadoes up into Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri... It really was a random/lucky event for us... I was coming home from school when I saw a nice tower going up... In very little time it was evolving into a beautiful rotating thunderstorm... I told Justyn Jackson to come out and look at it, and quickly we decided to call Lauren Raymer and go after it... We followed it to West Point, MS where we went east on highway 50 for about 3 or 4 miles when we saw a large tornado illuminated by lightning... It was crazy because before we saw the tornado there was constant violent lightning for about 10-15 minutes when all of a sudden it almost stopped completely... At about that point we saw an amazing tornado lit up by the few intense lightning strikes we had left...

I would say we got about 10 or so great views into the storm when the tornado was on the ground... We did the right thing and called it into the NWS but they didn't believe us... Ironically, many months later we gave this video to Todd Beal who showed it to the NWS Memphis, who then acknowledged it was definitely a tornado... However, still to this day I've never seen it in the SPC records... Very ironic when you really think about how many "BAD" tornadoes make it into the tornado records... I'm not going to go into the politics of that, but basically The Video Speaks For Itself... Enjoy!!!

On a side note there is some interesting lighting research out there relating to tornado genesis... Some talk about the polarity of the strikes, frequency of the strikes, and other interesting theories about structure/life cycles of lightning strikes and tornado genesis... In this case I've read a few papers on how intense lighting follow by near no lightning can be a sign of tornado genesis... Of course like any research you can interrupt the data anyway you want, but either way I would recommend reading up on some of these interesting papers... There are also many papers relating lightning and hurricanes, dealing with eye-wall replacement cycles/intensity... Again if you search the internet you will find a LOT of information on these subjects...

*WARNING* There are a few cuss words in this video... If you are sensitive to language then I wouldn't watch the video... It's not that bad at all, but I thought I would still give everyone fair warning...

© Greg Nordstrom 2004

ANY USE OF THIS VIDEO WITHOUT PERMISSION FROM GREG NORDSTROM IS PROHIBITED AND WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW...