Twin twisters, tiny F5s: some of the oddest tornadoes on record
Every once in a while, a storm will display some truly bizarre behaviour
Tornadoes are a relatively rare event. Only a tiny percentage of thunderstorms ever go on to produce a tornado. No two twisters are alike—and some of those storms are truly bizarre.
From twin tornadoes on the Plains to an exceptionally narrow monster on the Prairies, here’s a look at some of the oddest tornadoes ever recorded.
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Seven tornadoes hit one city in one night
One tornado is usually too much chaos for one lifetime. But the residents of Grand Island, Nebraska, endured seven twisters in about three hours on the night of June 3, 1980.
A large and powerful supercell thunderstorm crawled over the city that evening, moving south-southeast over Grand Island at just 13 km/h.
The first twister touched down at 8:45 p.m. Another followed fifteen minutes later, succeeded by another just five minutes after that. Four more tornadoes would strike the city through the 11 o’clock hour, three of which wound up rotating clockwise—an extremely rare feat in the northern hemisphere.
One of the twisters killed several people and left behind F4 damage in its wake. Two more of the tornadoes produced F3 damage. The tragic ordeal became known as “The Night of the Twisters,” inspiring both a children’s book and a made-for-television movie of the same name.
Canada saw one of the narrowest F5s on record
Meteorologists have only recorded 60 scale-topping F5 or EF-5 tornadoes since reliable recordkeeping began back in 1950. All but one of those storms struck the United States.
Canada’s sole F5 tornado hit the town of Elie, Manitoba, on the muggy afternoon of June 22, 2007. The slow-moving twister churned across the flat landscape like a drill bit, destroying several homes in its path.
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A scale-topping twister in Canada is rare enough. But it also ranked as one of the ‘smallest’ F5s on record.
Out of the 22 F5 or EF-5 tornadoes recorded since 1980, the average size of these devastating storms came out to around 1,100 metres in width. The tornado that struck Elie? Just 300 metres wide at its largest extent, ranking it among the smallest high-end twisters ever observed.
A monster in the mountains
Tornadoes are rare in mountainous areas because the jagged terrain often disrupts the organized structure of a thunderstorm needed to produce these whirlwinds. Even though they’re rare, tornadoes can and do happen in the mountains—sometimes exceptionally high up.
A violent thunderstorm that developed over northwestern Wyoming on the afternoon of July 21, 1987, produced a tornado high in the mountains above Yellowstone National Park. The twister was enormous, carving a path nearly 40 km long with a maximum width reaching 2.5 km in size.
This powerful F4 tornado caused an immense blowdown of trees throughout the heavily forested area—at an elevation of more than 3,000 metres on the Continental Divide. The unprecedented storm made this the highest-elevation violent tornado ever observed.
Twin tornadoes hit a Nebraska town
A severe weather outbreak on the American plains produced one of the most bizarre tornado sequences observed in modern history.
One thunderstorm over Pilger, Nebraska, produced two violent tornadoes simultaneously on the afternoon of June 16, 2014.
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The first twister touched down at 4:00 p.m. and directly struck the town of Pilger. Another tornado touched down 13 minutes later, moving just east of Pilger and eventually tracking parallel to its companion just a few kilometres to the west.
Both tornadoes produced high-end EF-4 damage, completely destroying numerous homes and businesses in the area. Sadly, each tornado also claimed one life amid the damage.
One of the most intense tornadoes moved ‘backwards’
Supercell thunderstorms in North America tend to move southwest to northeast due to prevailing winds and internal dynamics within the storms themselves. But one particularly intense tornado in Texas actually went ‘backwards.’
A scale-topping F5 tornado devastated portions of Jarrell, Texas, on May 27, 1997, killing 27 people and injuring hundreds more. What made the tornado more unusual than its intensity was the fact that the entire storm latched onto a boundary over central Texas, allowing it to move southwest into Jarrell.
Not only did the twister track in reverse compared to almost all other storms, but it virtually stalled out over one neighbourhood at maximum intensity.
“A ground survey revealed that most of the debris that was left in the area was extremely small, indicating the power of the tornadic winds,” the National Weather Service said in its post-storm assessment.
Header image courtesy of Ethan Schisler/NOAA Weather in Focus Photo Contest 2015.