chasingl00pingwinds

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Blog Post Master List!

blog posts are colored by event, and organized in alphabetical order. This thread will continue to update as the blog updates.

hurricanes, tornadoes , will update as blog updates..

Hurricane Sandy and Seaside Heights

The Horrell Hill EF4: the deadliest tornado in South Carolina history.

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The Horrell Hill EF4: the deadliest tornado in South Carolina history.

Horrell Hill is a small town in Richmond County, originally settled in the 1700s. The town's history was rich, having notable events and sites from both the Civil and Revolutionary Wars, including the Battle of Lower Bridge and the historic Grist Mill.

This tornado was a part of a widespread tornado outbreak spanning from Arkansas to Virginia from April 29-30th 1929 due to low pressure tracking through the Mississippi Valley. There were 26 significant tornadoes recorded. Altogether this outbreak had a death toll of 114 people, most of those being from the Horrell Hill tornado.

The storm began to really get severe in South Carolina early morning of April 30th, around 10:30 am. first forming near Aiken County in the late morning. The storm travelled through Lexington, Richland, Sumter, Lee, and Darlington counties before dying out in Pamplico at around 2:45 PM.

Hail was the size of peas for the most part, and damage scaled from ripped-off roofs and downed trees to literal buildings being demolished in place. Pictures show houses being shredded all the way to the foundation, and trees were ripped of their leaves.

This storm had 53 confirmed deaths attributed to it, including a woman who was struck by lightning, and an elementary school that was demolished while school was in session, killing four kids. students who survived recalled the incident as traumatic, remembering hearing people cry out for help through the rubble (The State). from snowstorms to hurricanes, South Carolina has dealt with multiple severe weather phenomena, but in all of the states history the 1929 tornado still stands as one of the most damaging/severe events in the history of the state (weather wise)

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Tornadoes Rip Through Mississippi 

On March 13, an expansive upper-level trough moved into the U.S. High Plains, Upper Midwest, and Midwest and began colliding with warm, moist air over the Mississippi Valley. The interaction helped fuel a major storm system that spread severe thunderstorms across several states. Many of these were supercells, a type of long-lived storm with a powerful rotating updraft. These storms often generate destructive tornadoes, hail, and damaging winds.

Among the hardest-hit states was Mississippi, where 18 tornadoes touched down during the outbreak. These included one EF-4, one EF-3, seven EF-2, seven EF-1, and two EF-0 rated events. The onslaught damaged nearly 1,000 homes and dozens of businesses and farms, according to the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency.

In some areas, damage was even visible to the Landsat 8 satellite. The images above, captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on March 22, 2025, show a lengthy damage track extending roughly 55 miles (90 kilometers), from near Progress in the southwestern part of the state toward Williamsburg. Assessments of the damage by the National Weather Service led them to assign the event an EF-4 rating, making this one of the strongest tornadoes of the outbreak. They estimated peak winds of 170 miles (274 kilometers) per hour in some areas.

Photographs taken from the ground show how fierce winds lopped off trees, flipped cars and trucks, and tore homes from their foundations. The photograph above, from NOAA’s Damage Assessment Toolkit, shows a grove of trees with their tops sheared off and damaged cabins near Paradise Ranch RV Resort, in one of several areas in Mississippi that experienced widespread destruction.

Three other smaller tornado tracks are also visible in the Landsat images: an EF-3 track from Tylertown to Goss, an EF-2 track from Melba to Moscos, and an EF-2 track from Bassfield to Williamsburg. In a rare occurrence, the Bassfield tornado even crossed paths with the EF-4 track, about 41 minutes after the first tornado passed, leaving an X-shaped pattern of damage in a forested area in Covington County.

The severe weather brought destruction to other states as well. According to news reports, the weather system produced at least 112 tornadoes that touched down in 14 states between March 14 and 16, taking dozens of lives, flattening scores of homes, and disrupting power supplies. Of those, at least 44 were classified as "strong" tornadoes, meaning they produced at least EF-2 damage on the Enhanced Fujita scale. For comparison, the United States typically sees 95 tornadoes in all of March.

In the wake of these storms, the NASA Disasters Program provided multiple types of satellite imagery to the Southern Region of the National Weather Service to support their damage assessment process. National Weather Service damage assessments serve as the official record of the path and strength of each tornado and are used to inform state and federal disaster declarations, help emergency responders prioritize aid, and validate and improve early warning systems. Identifying damaged areas and tornado tracks can be challenging in rural areas with limited road access, but satellite data helps provide a more complete picture.

At NASA’s Langley Research Center (LaRC), researchers are also harnessing satellite data to identify atmospheric patterns that can indicate severe weather on the ground. The NASA team is developing an open-source machine learning model that uses geostationary satellite data to identify potential overshooting cloud tops and above-anvil cirrus plumes, features that often appear at the tops of storms roughly 10 minutes before the most severe weather hits. According to Kristopher Bedka, an atmospheric scientist at LaRC, tracking the features can provide valuable lead time that saves lives and property.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Wanmei Liang, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photograph from NOAA’s Damage Assessment Toolkit, taken by a member of a National Weather Service storm survey team. Story by Adam Voiland.

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Someone has a sense of humor, at least.

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2008 PARKERSBURG, IOWA TORNADO

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I made a thing i guess

Graduation Party feel free to download it or something or listen idk based both off of just wanting to experiment and the parkersburg tornado for some reason

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Today the sky looked like straight from a van gogh painting

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Nature, increase thy thunders and hasten me upon the wings of thy barbarous winds.

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Hurricane Sandy and Seaside Heights

Hurricane Sandy formed in the Caribbean Sea in October 2012. It briefly inconvenienced the Greater Antilles, Jamaica, and the Bahamas as a Category 1-2 storm before degrading to a tropical storm. Actually, inconvenience is an understatement- at least one person died in Jamaica, where storm damage was so bad it ranked up to around 100 million dollars (130 million today) and most of its inhabitants were without power. things were much worse in Haiti, where the flooding killed around 54 people (USAID). there aren't many statistics on what percentage of deaths were islanders, but out of the 233 deaths, most were from the United States.

The storm continued northeast around 300 miles off the US coast where it reclaimed its hurricane status and grew into one of the largest Atlantic hurricanes on record. With a diameter of 1,000 nautical miles (1,150 mi it 1,850 km), It hurled itself towards New Jersey, merging with a mid-latitude cyclone where it was reclassified as a post-tropical cyclone by the NHC (Modeling Sandy) Now Superstorm Sandy made landfall in New Jersey on October 29th, 2012.

New Jersey and New York were hit the hardest, causing around 65 billion dollars in damages (86 billion today). the Jersey Shore was hit strenuously, with storm surges up to four to five feet (ABC 6). With the sudden storm surge and the vastness of the storm, Jersey's Seaside Heights boardwalk attraction was almost completely engulfed by the Atlantic Ocean. It's dystopian to see the grounds completely washed into the ocean, leaving a once lively pier to sit in desolation until people decide how, and if they should build the park back.

New York and New Jersey- despite all of the mandatory evacuation orders- were not ready for this storm at all, it's reflected through these images of the pier. It also reminds me of Helene and how the Appalachians were flooded on a whim, and the land was not prepared for it- I don't think they were ready. it doesn't need strong winds to do so. Helene and Sandy dumped rain in places not prepared to handle It, causing plenty of destruction.

The pier has since been rebuilt with better structural integrity after being abandoned for nearly years. It just reopened back in 2022. here's to a better future for poor seaside heights! Merry Christmas!

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In 1992, as Hurricane Andrew approached South Florida, the Miami Zoo faced the daunting task of preparing for the impending disaster. Ron Magill, who served as the assistant curator at the time, had been through multiple hurricane threats over his 12-year tenure, with none of them materializing as forecasted. Despite his initial skepticism, Magill and his team worked tirelessly to ensure the safety of all the zoo's animals.

One remarkable decision involved relocating 30 flamingos to the zoo's bathroom. This choice was practical due to the bathroom's lack of windows, a tile floor for easy cleaning, ample space to create makeshift beds using hastily scattered hay, and, most importantly, a readily available supply of fresh water. Magill and his team opened all the stalls, filled the toilets with water, and embarked on the challenging mission of moving the flamingos.

The flamingos proved to be uncooperative, causing a commotion during the transfer. Magill recalls, "These flamingos are flapping everywhere, we're grabbing them, we're getting full of flamingo water and stuff." Despite the chaos, they successfully relocated the birds. As Magill was leaving the bathroom, he turned around for one last look and was struck by the scene before him.

"I thought, Who would have ever thought these flamingos would be next to urinals looking at themselves in the mirrors?'" recalls Magill, now the zoo's communications director. He grabbed his camera to take a picture, which would become one of the most iconic images from the historic storm.

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Source details and larger version.

Crawling along: my collection of vintage turtle imagery.

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Source details and larger version.

Crawling along: my collection of vintage turtle imagery.