Guin was properly at night. The first Tanner tornado is by a long distance the most plausible option, probably the only one.
Hm, I thought it was late afternoon. Regardless it reached Decatur at the very end of it’s path.
Its official start time is 0150 UTC, which unless I've got the time zone conversion wrong is outside even twilight. First Tanner was at 2320.
yea, it’s probably Tanner #1 then. Still a really cool find! I’m holding out hope that a photo of Tri-State will eventually be found. Funny enough, looking at Doswell’s map of the event, it likely looked like a fatter Cullman (tail and everything) for at least a portion of its life.
It's *possibly* Guin but *only* if it were briefly illuminated by lightning
This could be the Moulton tornado (first of the Tanner pair), which should've occurred in daylight since it started at about 6:15 PM local time. That would be quite significant if so. Guin was nocturnal, so it is unlikely to be that.
Significant as in the tornado, or image itself? I myself had thought no images existed of any F5 in Alabama that day (obviously most of the northern F5s minus Brandenburg have existing images) until I found this image.
As in the image itself. As far as I know, that would be the first image of one of the Alabama violent tornadoes that day that could be confirmed as such.
Well there's an image of Huntsville taken after dark so it's not entirely implausible there's photographs of Guin out there somewhere, but this is likely Tanner #1.
As many others have stated, it's probably Tanner #1. This image has been around the block for a while, actually; it was first posted here in May 2022, albeit misattributed to Huntsville. Dig it:
Decatur-Huntsville, AL F3:
Not sure if this is in reference to Guin or Tri-State, but just in case: the descriptions of the Guin funnel I read in A Night to Remember seemed to be describing basically Hackleburg with the lights out (which, for the record, will almost certainly be my sleep paralysis demon for a while now), while Tri-State was a general shapeshifter: sometimes small, sometimes huge, possibly with double funnels and multi-vortex structure at certain points, but for the most part it was a wedge that seemingly alternated between a perfectly comprehensible and visible wedge and a "rolling fog bank" that may have looked near identical to Hackleburg as it rolled into Gorham/Murphysboro. It may have also been 2 miles wide in Missouri, in an area where it was described as "smoky black fog".
Just clear enough to make out a major horizontal vortex and the infamous Violent Tornado Lean.
Tri-State might be easier to understand through the prism of Kiowa mythology of the Mankayia than through anything else