Did you see this? An article at Wired Science explores the idea that urban sprawl, plus climate change, combined to manufacture last year’s devastating downtown tornado.

“The conditions that brought in the storm were the hammer,” analogized Purdue University climatologist Dev Niyogi, “but local features were the chisel. They pinpointed the severe weather.”

That tornado cut through town a year ago today, and as I type this it’s a mild rainy day inside the Perimeter, but just a few blocks from here houses still show their scars. If you know someone who was hurt personally when the sky came down to Atlanta that day, give them a call. Buy them a drink. Remember that strange and powerful day.

Exclusive to the Atlanta Metblog!

continuing with all things tornado;

doing some reading this morning i cam across this excellent map of the track of the downtown tornado.

(i was going to embed the map here, but we are still working through getting embedding to work, so i really encourage you to click the link. if we get it fixed, i will go back and embed it)

looking at it, i realized just how lucky i came. the tornado crossed over i-20 less than 1/4 of a mile from my house. instead of having no roof today, i am only missing some shingles, some siding and some flashing.

i am in toronto for a couple of day, but i am interested in how the cleanup is coming?

One of my trusted friends lives north of me near Cartersville, GA. He owns a large track of farm land in the vicinity.

Just after one of the major storms that rolled through the North West Metro area last week, he went outside to grab a quick look at any damage to his property. While outside – for just a moment – he looked up at the sky and thought he saw a bird. The bird seemed to be getting larger and larger. When “it” hit the ground, it turned out to be a 2×4 piece of lumber. Then he saw something else and it was a mattress in the air and it hit the ground not too far from him. Very quickly, a ton of stuff began to fall from the sky on to his property. Needless to say, he took cover.

No joke, he is for real and this was serious. A few moments later, other more “personal belongings” fell from the air. It turned out that the remnants of other people’s destroyed homes started raining down on his property – all sucked up by a tornado. Just amazing!

I thought his story was really out there and then I saw this story online: Tornado Blows Photo 130 Miles

It’s just all so amazing to me. I’m really hoping the Spring and Summer weather season is not going to an image of this incident. If so, we all need to dig bunkers NOW.

well, as i write this it appears that another strong storm is bearing down on douglasville and moving due east.  okay, THIS STORM IS HEADED TO DOWNTOWN IN TWELVE MINUTES.  LARGE HAIL AND ROTATION.

it is official. the national weather service confirmed that vine city, downtown and cabbagetown were hit by an f2 tornado with max winds of 120 mph. i certainly wasn’t exaggerating in the post i wrote from my blackberry last night. all the areas i thought were hit were.

andisheh at clfreshloaf must have had access to power and his camera with him, because his post is much more extensive than mine. check it out, he also has links to several pages of flickr photos.

one thing i will say having driven down dekalb avenue a few times today is that the city and it’s citizens seem to have their act together.  the king marta station is getting picked up (several of the big floor to ceiling windows blew out) and the trains were running.  it looked like work was going on at the cotton mill loft.  the post office near lenny’s was already being worked on, and the southeast auto warehouse, whcih imploded, was being picked up.

i am going to write about my personal experience over on my personal blog when i can get around to it, but right now it looks like i may need to go hide again.

how did the rest of you survive the storm?