When Tornados Collide

[Tuur]

This is something I stumbled across today. The National Weather Service in Peachtree City, Georgia, issued a statement about this, on 2/23/2023, but it could age off their web site (look under Public Information Statements if you want to see it. Basically, four tornados in Georgia rotated around a common point and some merged. Here's one from a media site. See:

National Weather Service updated analysis indicates as many as 4 tornadoes at once on January 12

Radar and ground survey damage analysis indicates multiple tornadoes at one time, with some crossing paths and merging within each other.

www.wsbradio.com

Note: In the early 1980s, we had tornado damage that would only make sense if it were more than one rotating around a common center, so that doesn't surprise me. That tornados can merge does.

 

[Ophiolite]

Interesting. It seems this was not the first time it has been observed:

Documenting a Rare Tornado Merger Observed in the 24 May 2011 El Reno–Piedmont, Oklahoma, Supercell​

in Monthly Weather Report Vol: 143, Issue 8. You can access the full paper here.

The final sentences of the abstract reads as below. I have emphasised a pertinent point from it.

The tornadic vortex signatures (TVSs) associated with the tornadoes traveled around each other in a counterclockwise direction then merged in a helical manner up through storm midlevels. Upon merging, both the estimated intensity and size of the TVS associated with the resulting tornado increased dramatically. Similarities between the merger observed in this case and in previous cases also are discussed.

Within the body of the paper the authors note this:
Excluding tornadic subvortices, the authors are aware of only two other supercell cases discussed in the literature in which simultaneous cyclonic tornadoes possibly merged: the interaction/merger of two tornadoes near Midway, Indiana, during the Palm Sunday Outbreak of 11 April 1965 and the interaction/merger of the Hesston and Goessel, Kansas, tornadoes on 13 March 1990.