Abstract
IN the Monthly Weather Review for March 1933 there is an account dated April 5, 1933, by R. M. Williamson, of the Weather Bureau Office at Nashville, Tennessee, of a severe tornado that visited that city, on March 14, 1933. Although the storm has in Mr. Williamsons opinion been exceeded in violence by others, even within the state of Tennessee, the account is of more than usual interest in that it has been written by a meteorologist, who was extremely near to the centre of the storms path. He was so near in fact that common prudence prevented him from making what would probably have proved fatal to him direct observation of the storms near approach. One of his assistants, F. V. Jones, gives a graphic account of the phenomenon as it appeared from a point about three-quarters of a mile north of the track of the funnel cloud, describing the latter as moving rapidly across a light-coloured background of rain, looking very much like a shadow moving across a motion-picture screen. The right hand side of the path of destruction passed within about 400 ft. (to the north-north-west) of the Weather Bureau Station, where the wind after veering suddenly from south-east to south-west rose to a maximum of 65 miles an hour for about a minute, a speed which must not of course be confused for a moment with that probably reached in the vortex itself. A thunderstorm, with unusually large hailstones, preceded the tornado by several minutes, and the more permanent veer of the wind to north-west, the direction of the main wind-current of the rear of the V-shaped trough with which the storm was associated, did not take place until about an hour later. Material damage amounted to nearly half a million pounds, but the loss of life in Nashville, in spite of the eight-mile track through a densely populated city, was eleven only. The writer described a number of cases that seem to be a common feature in tornadoes, where comparatively fragile objects have penetrated or severed much more solid wooden objects, making clean holes or cuts without any splintering.
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Severe Tornado at Nashville, Tennessee. Nature 132, 237 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/132237a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/132237a0