Local Meteorologist Reacts To Western New York Tornado

Another tornado touched down in Western New York on Monday, and it caught a lot of people off guard. 

It was an EF-1 tornado, with wind gusts up to 90 MPH, that hit downtown Buffalo close to City Hall. In its path, the tornado damaged buildings, trees, and even flipped cars, which caused a few streets to be closed for clean-up. 

Several videos were posted on social media, with one filmed from a building on Delaware Avenue capturing the exact moment where the water spout touched the ground just before 1 PM. No injuries were reported, thankfully, but many people in Western New York were upset that there wasn’t much of a warning from the National Weather Service for the tornado. 

Patrick Hammer, the chief meteorologist from WGRZ, reacted to the tornado on his X page, addressing the concerns that many people had with the National Weather Service. 

In the video, you can see the footage of the tornado moving through Niagara St. and Carolina St. heading towards Delaware Ave. 

“You can see the swirling debris and even part of a roof come off,” Hammer said in the video. 

A lot of weather things occurred to cause the tornado to form. It was a warm and unstable atmosphere, as Hammer described, and the wind from both Lake Ontario and Lake Erie met in an area called “a convergence boundary.” 

When the air meets, it rises up. 

“It was kind of wind up at the upper levels of the atmosphere, kind of intersected this thing, got the atmosphere all spinning, and what was the result…was a tornado,” Hammer said.

“We get tornadoes here,” Hammer continued. “This was not the classic tornado day. This took a lot of us kind of by surprise. The Weather Service did mention [a] possible tornado in their warning.” 

“It was kind of the confluence of a lot of things and also the mercurial nature of Buffalo’s weather all took place and formed this swirling vortex that, you know, literally crossed the Niagara River right over Buffalo, and then it dissipated, luckily,” Hammer said. 

The tornado actually broke a record in New York State for most tornadoes in a single year. The one in Buffalo on Monday marked the 26th tornado in New York for the 2024 year, and it’s not over yet. 

The record was originally set in 1992 with 25 confirmed tornadoes that year, according to the State Weather Risk Communication Center.  

And while there have been several tornadoes in Western New York this year, the one confirmed on Monday snuck up on us. Even Patrick Hammer seemed stunned. 

“Today, I will admit, was a day that I will look back on and go, whoa,” Hammer said at the end of his video.