The Perfect Storm

The picture above shows the large funnel cloud that passed over our school. Tennessee got EF4 tornados out of this cloud. We were blessed, it missed us.

The funnel cloud is on the left (it was starting to dissipate when I took the picture). The light you see is lightning, 4-5 bolts of it.

Here we are having an 'outdoor classroom' session. Notice the short sleeve shirts. It was 75 degrees today, Tuesday February 5th, right before the 'perfect storm' hit our state. As you can see, the weather is looking pretty dark up on top. We had 2 hours of tornado warning sirens this evening and a total of 13 people died in Arkansas because of this storm. Luckily, none of the tornados hit Pine Bluff, but several counties north of us got hit.

SO WHAT HAPPENED??

Arkansas had two fronts come through it. We had a front made of Maritime Tropical air over us and a front of Continental Polar air meet it around Texas. The cold front was moving fast and pushed its way under the warm air. The warm air rose fast-- and the rest is history. We had a squall line go right through Pine Bluff. There was 80 reported sightings of tornados between Arkansas and Tennessee.

Weather like this is unusual for this time of year, but obviously it does happen. Temperature today? 41 degrees.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the 47 people who died during this storm yesterday.