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Tornado warning for part of Suffolk County

Bad cloud. Photo by Jayne HendryOminous cloud over Cambridge. Photo by Jayne Hendry.

UPDATE: The storm knocked out power in Salem and Saugus and NECN reports cars in flood waters on Broadway in Malden.

Around 2:05, the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for "extreme northeastern Suffolk County." Which would be, what, Revere and Winthrop? In any case, the NWS based its warning on radar showing "a severe thunderstorm capable of producing a tornado" near Lynn that was moving east at 25 m.p.h.

Amazing storm photo from State Street.

Ed. note: All of a sudden my phone's screen lit up with a giant red triangle with an exclamation mark of doom in the middle warning me to "take shelter now." NWS should probably want to give better definitions that people actually use around here, like town names, rather than "extreme northeastern Suffolk County."

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Comments

rut-roh.

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I was really excited and ran around work gleefully because my phone did something cool.

People stared.

Also, they canceled the warning.

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It was in Lynn, according to the radar.

There's much more coming all across the area, so stay alert. Check wunderground.com for the radar.

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I'm in Natick and we just had a solid 15 minutes
of black sky, huge rain, big lightning, and hail.

First we were the surface of hell.
Now we're apparently brewing a perfect storm.
Love-eh-ly.

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For people in a hurry, Aunt Jemima sells microwaveable French toast. Of course, it's of no use if the power goes out.

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I always knew "Tornado Warning" to be "there's actually a tornado" while "Tornado Watch" meant that storms were looking good enough to produce one.

kind of confusing when they use "Warning" if it's only just a "Watch". Present day fear mongering from the media?

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A watch is when conditions are right for the potential development of a tornado (or hurricane, or severe thunderstorm, or whatever). A warning is when there's some evidence that the condition is about to hit.

In today's case, there was a distinct "hook" at the southernmost tip of a storm moving eastward north of Boston - something even a weather novice like me could notice on the weather.com radar image for 2 p.m. Basically, when you see one of those on radar, it's a good sign a tornado is moments away - or has already formed. So time for a warning.

If you're going to "blame" anybody, it's the National Weather Service, not the media.

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first for me, but my Droid popped up a CMDA alert for flash flooding and a tornado watch.

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Alert!

My phone basically just lit up and this thing was there. I basically have my sound off, so I don't know if it's also supposed to trigger an audible alert.

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Several of my coworkers got those tornado warnings on their phones in our offices in Kendall (in fact, we're in the green roofed building in the photo, so we were looking at that same scene).

They're part of the new Wireless Emergency Alerts system. Not all phones are equipped for it; mostly it's just some Android models right now, but should become common on new phones in the future. The alerts are broadcast from specific cell phone towers to all phones connected to them, rather than text messaged to specific numbers, so they're supposed to be very locally targetable.

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Took a right turn out of Oak grove Station and was greeted by the darkest sky I've ever seen.:
IMAGE(http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7dagjdkmG1qcqf8bo1_500.jpg)
mind you, the station was still in full sun. And then the lightning started. suffice to say, I turned around.

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i.wund.com is their mobile avatar, www.wunderground.com is their main page.

You can go to the radar, click "animate radar" and get an idea of how storms are forming and moving through the area.

I've used this for years to avoid nasty summer storms when commuting by bike.

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Down in Providence today and we've had hail so bad that someone's truck got dented in the parking lot (allegedly).

It's been really, really bad down here for the past hour and I am not looking forward to the commute back up to Boston tonight.

If anyone has info on the Neponset/North Quincy area, I'd appreciate an update.

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and this time people were driving like assholes

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Very cool photo from Kendall Square! I saw this cloud from my glass and glass office building, and was hopeful for a bruiser of a storm to entertain during one snoozer of a meeting. Sadly we didn't get much excitement, just a lot of rain and wind a couple hours later. I was totally oblivious to the coming of the apocalypse in other areas.

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For extreme northeastern Suffolk County:

Storm approaching Boston Harbor.

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..except we didn't have so much water around Tulsa (the Arkansas River mainly being mostly dry, due to upstream reservoirs).

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