The word “busy” would be an understatement for tonight. I had no idea myself and my weather team would travel for over 5 hours and cover 150 plus miles.

The afternoon started off with plenty of snow in the Midwest and our top story quickly changed. We were also monitoring possible storms in the Southeast and they more than fired up just before 4pm.

3:50 pm:
My producer Darrell and I took the Weather Plus radar right into the zone of concern, Southern Alabama.

3:55 pm::
Storms intensify and we start picking up hail on our radar at .50 – 1” in diameter. We also spot 2 strong individual thunderstorms that could be supercells.

4:00 - 5:00 pm:
Tornado warnings are posted and we are busy as almost the entire central Alabama is covered in warnings. My colleague Gary Archibald and I started covering the tornados. 6-12 warnings are posted over the hour. We start to classify our original thunderstorms of concern as “supercells” that are cruising at 45 mph.

5:00 - 6:00 pm:
The tornado activity continues…

The two thunderstorm cells in the above video are again what we call supercells, which are long lived storms. Supercells are known for producing tornados, very gusty winds and hail.

6:00 - 8:00 pm:
The storms continue as the dynamics in the atmosphere remain perfect. Storm reports start coming in with hail as large as golf balls and possible tornados on the ground.

8:00 - 9:00 pm:
Nearly 5 hours after our first strong thunderstorm started it was still producing gusty winds and moving through Southern Georgia.

Click above video to see the storm pass across several states.

Our stong supercell traveled over 5 hours and 160 miles!

The dynamics in the atmosphere were perfect for these storms on our Wednesday as Wind Shear, Daytime heating and a front all interacted.

Jeff Ranieri – Meteorologist