Weekend tornado watches all over New England and only one verified: Over-forecasting or playing it safe?
Seeing tornado watches in New England is something rare. Normally we see only one or two tornado watches a year. However last weekend, the Storm Prediction Center issued three tornado watches for the northeast; two on Saturday and one on Sunday. Here are the reports from the weekend:
Over the weekend there were numerous hail and wind reports over New England, but only one tornado report. That is located near Craftsbury, VT. The National Weather Storm Survey confirmed damage that was close to an EF-0 or EF-1 type tornado, which typically has winds between 65 and 110 mph.
Something that I thought about over the weekend was this: Why the heck did they issue a tornado watch? A simple severe thunderstorm watch would have sufficed. And I bet a lot of people were saying the same thing. But keep in mind that a tornado watch does not in any way mean that tornadoes will occur. It simply means that the atmospheric conditions are favorable for the development of tornadoes. Tornadogenesis is still something that we cannot understand fully (hopefully research from Vortex 2 will change that).
Either way the Storm Prediction Center made the right call. It is much better to over-forecast these events and have a false alarm, than to under-forecast and have a tornado rip through a city with no watch/warning. However money then becomes an issue. False alarms cost money….money that may not need to be spent.
