Radar images of tornado, Southern Moravia, Czech Republic
Yesterday it was a pretty bad day, I mean the late afternoon and the evening. The day was extremely hot, it was more than 33 C in my location. The weather station was showing extreme heat alerts for a whole day.
In the late afternoon I looked outside and noticed that the was not normally dark like when a normal thunderstorm is coming. It was dark brown, on some places simply very brown. And it was not moving from one side to another, but it looked like it was very slowly turning around, like some extremely large carousel.
After couple of minutes the first lightnings came and the first gentle rain was replaced by ice pieces 1~2 cm big. I thought that these will damage the roof windows, but fortunately didn’t. The whole thunderstorm continued with a very strong wind, the antenna on the rooftop of the house was moving from one side to another like crazy and the whole house was vibrating with a strong noise all around.
After some time it became calm for a while, so I run to the garden and checked the house, roof, etc, simply visually from the ground. I was shocked by the sky, it was still like the imagination of the hell’s gate open or something. I run back inside house and the thunderstorm continued. When it again went calm, I checked the weather radar and the lightning detector – this counted more than 70 lightnings per minute on one small place. The screenshot of the radar is below.
In my location the damages were not big, maybe just water inside houses, local power outages and mess all around in the gardens and yards. We were happy this time, because we were just on the edge of the whole tornado base clouds. The neighboring villages around are completely damaged. The tornado reached the level 4 of the international tornado/hurricane level (number 5 is maximum).
The wind speed was 335 km/h (source Czech Television).
Some newspaper websites with their photos can be found here:
- Guardian
- BBC
- iDnes
- iDnes, photos of CTK (Czech Press Agency)
- SwissInfo
- Clouds formation photos taken from above by an airline pilot
