Newspapers of New England
Published: 5/17/2022 3:12:02 PM
The storm system that brought heavy rains and thunderstorms as it moved through the region Monday also dropped a tornado on the Upper Valley.
The National Weather Service on Tuesday afternoon confirmed that the wild weather caught on a driver’s dashboard camera in Charlestown was a tornado — officially categorized as EF-1, the least damaging level on what is known as the Fujita scale, with estimated winds of 90 mph.
Wes Carter was driving through town Monday evening when he spied a dark, swirling funnel cloud ahead of him. The high winds bent trees and utility polls along the road and rain drummed against his car.
He pulled over as the tornado barreled toward him on the highway, brushing close to his car. Then, he drove ahead, skirting the fallen trees. After the ordeal, he uploaded the dashcam video to YouTube.
The video, shared online and on TV stations, shows a funnel cloud touching the ground near Route 12, just south of Claremont. That road and Route 12A were closed through Tuesday due to damage from fallen trees.
Weather Service staff made the determination that the storm was an official after doing on-the-ground inspection. One of the things they looked for is the pattern of trees knocked down by the high winds.
“If we notice in our survey that all the downed trees are pointing in the same direction” that indicates a straight-ahead wind storm, said Jon Palmer, meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Gray, Maine. “A tornado report will have the trees fallen in different directions, indicating that the damaging wind was rotating.”
Monday’s storm system swept through much of the East Coast, creating small tornados in at least two states as well as huge thunderstorms, heavy rain and occasional hailstorms.
Historically, New Hampshire has an average of 1.6 tornadoes a year, usually during the warm summer months. Tornadoes are rare in May in New Hampshire but not unknown. Changing weather patterns caused by climate change has made it more difficult to predict specific seasons for all types of extreme weather.