Alright, as noted before in some posts, Tuesday, July 29, I am leaving for Basic Training with the U.S. Army. I currently do not know what will happen to the site, the domain expires in December and I am not yet sure if I'll renew it then or finally just let it expire.

Until then, however, you can still find the latest Hurricane Information on the front of the website, and a friend of mine might very well edit the blogs on occasion. I hope to be back online maybe in mid October, but I am not sure yet.

Well, this is one Mother's Day I'll never forget! From clouds and sun, to rain and storms.


This morning started off cool, as the warm front had not passed through our area, due to an MCS that decided it would like to visit from about 11 am through 2 pm. Starting around 1 pm, the temperature gradually started increasing and the dewpoint along with it. The SPC was concerned, and rightfully so, about the potential for severe thunderstorms.


Sometime after 3, the sun finally broke out through the clouds and things started getting dicey. The SPC issued Tornado Watch #309 for Eastern NC at 4:45 p.m. It did not take long for the first storms to fire up.


There were cells that fired up over Duplin, which quickly became severe. A weak storm tried to pop up in northern Jones County, but it was undercut by the nearby supercell in Duplin. As the supercell progressed onwards, it moved into Jones County and sparked off a Tornado Warning. This TOR Warning would be the first of many.


The storm quickly progressed to the Northeast, where it produced a Wall Cloud over an airport in Jones. The storm then became a right mover, signaling that it had fairly strong rotation.


At 6:45 pm, the National Weather Service in Newport issued a Tornado Warning for Jones and Craven counties, including the city of Havelock. I had already been taking photos of the storm cell, so this just made things more interesting (and for a while, scary). The cell approached, dropped a tornado in Maysville, at which time the radar showed a well defined "Hook" echo.



AT 658 PM EDT...THE PUBLIC REPORTED A TORNADO ON THE GROUND ON THE SOUTHEAST SIDE OF MAYSVILLE. THE TORNADO WAS MOVING EAST AT 45 MPH.



THE TORNADO WILL BE NEAR...
THE CHERRY POINT AIR STATION AND HAVELOCK BY 720 PM EDT...
CHERRY BRANCH BY 725 PM EDT...

The storm produced intermediate weak hook echoes after that reported touchdown, but I have not heard reports of damage or other touchdowns. The storm passed over Havelock, at which point I noticed a strange feature protruding from the base of it. Upon getting a better look at it, the object turned out to be a Wall Cloud. There was no rotation to the wall cloud that I saw, however. I did call it in, to the NWS Newport office. No rain or hail was associated with this storm at my house, and there was very little thunder.


The second, and "final" cell, formed behind this supercell, and also went tornadic and supercellular fairly quickly. I have not heard of any reports of wall clouds or funnels/touchdowns...but one quick look at the radar told me it was going to be a prolific hail producer.


Those suspensions were confirmed by reports from all over the Havelock and surrounding areas of hail between penny and quarter sized. All we got here at the house, though, was a heavy rain. Areas north of me got pounded by that decent sized hail. I hope some people I know got pictures of it, because it always seems everyone else gets the hail and we get nothing! (Though a lot of the time, that is always a good thing...)

Most of coastal NC was under a tornado warning during some part of the day, there was hail all over the place, and I got to see a wall cloud...Who forgot to give me the memo that I moved to Kansas?!

I have talked before about NOAA Weather Radios and how they can and do save lives when severe weather strikes. If you do not have a NOAA Weather Radio, you need to buy one. The NWS even states they should be like smoke and fire detectors, with each house hold having at least one, as well as schools and businesses. If I were to buy one, I would buy one with the S.A.M.E technology in it, as I hate being woken up in the middle of the night, only to find out that the warning was for another county possibly up to 50 miles away.

Make sure, if you buy one, that it plugs into a wall for its main power source (unless its a portable one) and also make sure that it can use batteries as well; as if the power goes out you will still want to be able to receive any watches or warning that are issued.

For more information on what you can get with NOAA Wx Radios (depending on the brand) please visit this site here:
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/nwr/nwrrcvr.htm
If you would like to purchase one, you can go to this site or to a local electronics store and pick one up:
http://www.ambientweather.com/noaaradio.html

For the SAME radios, you will need to enter a code for your specific county, you can find this code at this link:
http://www.weather.gov/nwr/indexnw.htm#sametable
There should be instructions with your new radio, telling you how to enter the SAME Code properly, as well as how to use your new radio.



Some people, especally those not used to weather terms may want to know what some of these terms mean. Here are some links to help tell you some common terms used by the National Weather Service (NWS) and the National Hurricane Center (NHC)...
NHC FAQ's: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/tcfaqHED.html
Preparedness and Weather Safety From The NWS: http://www.erh.noaa.gov/rah/preparedness/
National Weather Service Glossary: http://www.weather.gov/glossary/
Also...just to let everyone know...Wx stands for Weather. Wx was used in code to make the reports/code shorter. I hope you find the terms you need and everyone stay safe.
Hurricane preparedness link: NHC Preparedness Site

As this site is called TrackaHurricane.com, we finally got around to updating the hurricane tracking software here. The updates are not completely finished yet, however the major stuff is pretty much taken care of. This was linked to on the bar above a while ago, however due to the forum being put up and the blog being put up, these features were dislinked and forgotten about. I was browsing through the files on the site and came across them and have since decided to reuse them as it would help greatly when it gets busy here soon.
There is a local weather forecast straight from the NWS where all you have to do is type in your zip code to recieve your local radar and forecasts.
There is the Storm Tracker for tracking tropical systems and for receiving the latest advisories, sat images, forecasted tracks, and past information on the storm for both the Atlantic and East Pacific.
There is a link to G.O.E.S. Sat images of the U.S. and waters nearby.
Then there is one last item. On the sat images and radar, you can loop them!!!
Please notice, due to this stuff just being revived on August 4th, or yesterday, that the images will load a little slow and a few may not work. We are working as quickly as we can to straighten out these problems and hope that you enjoy the new systems. Also, send us an e-mail or leave a comment on what you think about the new systems and any suggestions you may have.
Local Weather
Tropical Cyclone Tracking For Atlantic And East Pacific Storms
G.O.E.S. Sat Images

I am partnering with another site, and you can visit this link to listen to news and hurricane coverage live when we have coverage going. I will let everyone know when we are having coverage, as of right now though, there is no live coverage, however when we have live coverage you can listen in at this link: Broadcast On The Tropics