Almost Tornadic Storm over Yadkin / Winston-Salem, N.C.
On the Evening of March 23, big storms rolled through Yadkin County and Winston-Salem and brought the possibility of a tornado, though none were a touchdown by no means, this storm had allot of dangerous characteristics that could have easily brought a tornado to the area. Illustrated on this site, are radar maps that should help explain in greater detail why all the local NEWS channels stayed on this storm.
As earlier stated, these storms were big, they already exhibited high thunderstorm towers into the 30k-ft. range over Wilkes County, before television personalities interrupted their local broadcasts. Along with their towers high, the VIL (Vertically integrated Liquid index) was already abnormally high. VIL is little-known to allot because weather-casters don't usually show these maps, it is a radar-derived product of NEXRAD.
![]() |
Echo-Tops in 1000's of feet (Peak yellow=>35k-ft.) |
![]() |
VIL (Vert. Integrated Liquids) measured in Kg/m³ |
VIL can often times be used to assess the possibility and size of hail-stones. But! there are times you can be under high VIL and not see any hail, this may be because Hail in flying back up into the thunderstorm tower and not dropping to the ground! So regard VIL as describing the amount of liquid within the tower.
When these storms moved over northeast Yadkin County, there was some big rotation starting to form within the storm, this can be elegantly illustrated by yet another radar item called Storm Relative Mean Radial Velocity (SRMV). It depicts speed and direction on rain-shafts within the storm to assess the possibility of tornadoes.
![]() |
Velocity at 4:54 PM EST. |
The speeds are very high over northeastern Yadkin County, not only that, there are sharp Shifting of direction on the rain-shaft's too.
![]() |
Area of concern when it comes to a possibility of a tornado. |
![]() |
| Almost 50 mile-per-hour winds, headed south and 20
MPH headed north. |
A great place to get these types of radar images is http://vortex.plymouth.edu/nids.html and http://www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/radar/
James Gandee | Weather Archive `05