GRIFFIN, Ga. — Fourteen tornadoes touched down in Georgia on January 12, 2023. But what unfolded in Spalding and Pike counties was a meteorological anomaly for the state. Up to four tornadoes were on the ground at once in Spalding and Pike counties one year ago.
Last year, Keith Stellman walked this very same path. He and his colleagues at the National Weather Service in Peachtree City surveyed the damage.
When they first arrived in Spalding County, they had an inkling of what to expect.
"We had already been prepped (by emergency management) that it was pretty bad," Stellman said.
They walked along the damaged path and then went to the emergency management office to start mapping the damage.
"It was up on the maps... And they had marked from one end of the county to the other. And he [the emergency manager] said, 'Why don't we get you up in the helicopter,'" Stellman recalled.
They went up in Georgia State Patrol's helicopter above the damage.
"We started flying over it, and the helicopter pilot was just flying us over the worst of the damage. And then he said, 'Well, there's more down here, and more down here, and more down here,'" Stellman said.
Stellman started plotting the damage points in a special system.
"Something doesn't make sense... This isn't right, this thing's over two miles wide!" he exclaimed.
Stellman had flown over damage and surveyed tornado damage for decades. He knows what to look for.
However, this wasn't all from one tornado. They needed to do a deeper dive to get down to the root of the problem.
In the weeks that followed, Stellman and his colleague Kyle Theim took a closer look at the radar data from that day and special aerial imagery they requested from the Geospatial Insurance Consortium.
They came to a conclusion: there were multiple tornadoes on the ground at once, rotating around the main circulation.
Back in Alabama, the storm that struck Spalding County began as a supercell. It hit Selma, Alabama, earlier that day, producing significant damage. But as it got into Georgia, it began to change.
"As the storms moved in from Alabama, they took on more of a hybrid form," Stellman added.
It became more of a squall line or quasi-linear convective system but still had the supercell circulation embedded within it. That allowed for the unique setup once the cell moved from Meriwether into Pike and Spalding counties: multiple tornadoes spun up.
Like a twirling ballet dance, each tornado twisted individually but all danced around the main circulation. As the storm evolved, some of these tornadoes merged.
"Each time that was about the happen, the parent (main tornado) ingested some of the energy from the other occluding tornado," Stellman explained.
This happened in three separate instances. At its peak, there were as many as four tornadoes on the ground at once.
This is a scenario that was incredibly rare. Thiem did study similar scenarios out in Tornado Alley in his graduate school research, in particular on the 2013 El Reno tornado, which he was able to apply to this tornado reanalysis.
They also believe this tornado pivot and merge phenomenon occurred in Wilcox County that day. It could have also taken place in another cycle as the storm moved into Henry, Butts, Newton and Jasper counties. However, without the same high-resolution aerial data and lower-level radar data, they were unable to complete a similar reanalysis.
In total, the National Weather Service concludes that 14 tornadoes touched down on Jan. 12, 2023, – including 10 that occurred from this same main circulation. There was one EF-3, five EF-2s, seven EF-1s, and one EF-0 tornado. In addition, they increased the maximum wind speeds for the EF-3 tornado in Spalding County to 155 mph, a high-end EF-3.
One year later, the large damaged swath still remains. The tree debris field is expansive and hundreds of trees are still uprooted or snapped. Tarp-lined roofs still litter the streets. Some cars still remain sitting, windows cracked and metal smashed in. And some slabs remain standing, waiting for an opportunity for new growth.
But what is amazing is that we didn't have more loss of life from how expansive the tornado damage was that day. Stellman credits this to a number of factors.
"We hope some of that is education... people know what to do, where to go. We also hope that the media is reaching more people and educating them on who needs to take shelter and where. We also know that wireless emergency alerts play a big role in getting that early warning," Stellman said.
But at the end of the day, some of it is luck.
"Sometimes we come to a house where the tree fell on one side, and the homeowner is on the other side. We see a lot of cases like that," he added.
Stellman also credits the lack of mobile home communities in the paths of the tornadoes. He said that's the worst place to be.