A tornado blasted through Salisbury tornado flips cars, mows down trees

A tornado blasted through Salisbury tornado flips cars, mows down trees





Dramatic video has emerged of the tornado that blew through Salisbury, Md., on Monday around 1:40 p.m. The tornado overturned three cars, downed trees and damaged buildings. No serious injuries were reported.



In the video above, a security camera at Hopper’s Tap House captures a car cartwheeling from the parking lot into a roadway, carried by the storm’s violent winds



Storm eyewitness Edward Scheitlin Jr. was driving along South Salisbury Boulevard when the storm was underway and decided to start recording. At the beginning of his video (below), Scheitlin Jr. captured the storm’s funnel and also a transformer exploding as it passes.



For the second time in two weeks, a tornado formed in eastern Maryland. The first one  struck along the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay and was rated an EF2 (on a scale of zero to five). Monday’s damaging storm, which was rated an EF1, unfolded in Salisbury, Md., just south of the Delaware state line.



Both storms developed in a similar type of severe thunderstorm environment. The meteorology is complex but fascinating. Let’s take a closer look at Monday’s storm.

The shortwave also created large regions of spin at different levels in the atmosphere (the spin covers much larger regions than single thunderstorm cells; do not conflate with a mesocyclone), and a basic tenet of atmospheric dynamics states that this situation can induce air to rise.

Tuesday’s storms over the Eastern Shore were subject to very strong “dynamic lift,” and  the intensity of jet stream spin is denoted by levels of green shading in the image.