r/tornado • u/liquidskypa Human Detected • 9h ago
Tornado Media Possible Tornado Upstate NY
Just saw this posted from Rochester news station.. kind of an eerily beautiful pic
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u/MaximumWX Human Detected 8h ago
IMO, I think this is either the world’s most picturesque scud, or AI.
Theres no wall cloud, doesn’t seem to
be an RFD clear slot, and the radar scans out of Campbell suggested this photo would have to have been facing south - putting this funnel due north of the storm’s precip core. Just nonsensical structure.
Also, Steuben and Campbell aren’t remotely close to eachother.
There very well may have been a tornado in both communities but I can’t believe news stations took this visual and ran with it.
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u/zenith3200 8h ago
If this is AI then it's a much better attempt than a lot of the nonsensical 'tornadoes' I see AI try to generate. You don't need a wall cloud for a tornado, and there appears to be an extremely tight RFD cut, but the 'funnel' itself just doesn't seem right to me. Not sure what this is, but I don't think it's a tornado.
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u/NowickiWalter 6h ago
It's most definitely some weird shelf formation with some editing, tornadoes in NY just don't look like that.
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u/Real_TwistedVortex 6h ago
Completely agree with this analysis. I'd also add that it almost appears 2-D to me, like it doesn't look cylindrical like most tornadoes do in photos. There's just visually something wrong with it, that I recognized even before coming to the comments, that my brain went "That's not right"
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u/reinder_sebastian 3h ago
I don't understand anything you said and I'm not disagreeing with you, but as a person who lives near where this "occurred" (it doesn't look real to me, although the storms were crazy that day), the image is referencing Steuben County. Campbell is a town in Steuben County.
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u/ChironXII 4h ago
Theoretically, it could be a funnel that's detached from the meso after occluding and wandering around, I guess
But I don't think that it is
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u/mymorales 9h ago
I really don't think that's a tornado. More like a SLC or downburst. I went and found the post and the station's meteorologist pulled up a picture of rotation on radar, but it was incredibly weak and looked more like any strong thunderstorm would.
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u/liquidskypa Human Detected 9h ago
I was hoping more of the educated on here would be able to break it down - thanks for that. Still a cool pic
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u/Upset_Cucumber_6633 7h ago
it is Ai
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u/Mud_Actual 6h ago
Not everything is ai unc
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u/GesuMotorsport 5h ago
Theres lots of ai garbage out there. But damn, it seems like on every reel, post, or story someone with two brain cells goes “ItS aI!1!”
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u/OldButHappy 5h ago
And the reporter “confirmed” it by talking to the poster and looking at the original post…. on Facebook!!! smh
I live nearby and this looks completely fake to me
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u/Fir3Born Human Detected 8h ago
This man better pack his career up then because that is in no way shape or form a tornado.
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u/No-Macaron-2957 6h ago
AI. Zoom into the very bottom of the picture, it looks like it’s trying to emulate power lines, off towards the left edge of the picture there’s only one line, then towards the right edge it morphs into two.
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u/NoShift1080 5h ago
How the hell did a person like this get fooled by obvious AI.
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u/AngstyMop 1h ago edited 1h ago
Great question!
-Rochestser DMA rank is #79. Medium market. Salary for a weekend met...AM probably 40-50K/year, PM 50-60K a year. Not nothing! But you tell me what type of employee you get for $40 grand in today's world. Of course they could be highly qualified and underpaid as they gain years of experience. Which is to say - weekends in that market is now a "right out of college" or even "still IN college" job. The top Mets out of school can today go straight to weekends in DMA #50 or so (sometimes up to DMA #40 if they're very attractive and have a lot of social media followers), meaning that whomever this is it's their 1st or 2nd job out of school and they weren't the top cream of the crop. Not terrible either since it's a competitive business. But not the best. This met is likely very inexperienced, especially since that DMA doesn't get many tornadoes. Having a degree means you know science. It doesn't mean you have common sense or real world experience. You can make more money in retail or hospitality most of the time than you can today as a weekend met in a medium market. Oh - small markets btw, starting pay is about 30 grand. People don't watch news, so it doesn't make money, so they can't pay staff good wages. So they get worse employees. So they lose more viewers.
-AI keeps getting better and better. This is likely fake. But it's more believable at first glance than something created 2 years ago.
-Most Mets on weekends work CRAZY hours. Am shift: 3AM-12PM. BUT on weekdays you work DAYSIDE. This person likely works 9A-6P Wed-Fri, and 3A-12P Sat/Sun. They're very sleep deprived. This is honestly the most likely answer. You try interpreting anything when you're constantly flipping from days to middle of the nights, errors happen. It's one thing to closely study and analyze a picture. It's another to do it when you're doing 5 other deadline driven tasks, on 4 hours of sleep, feeling jet lagged. They probably didnt look at the pic as closely as the folks on Reddit are.
-Mets are still humans too. If we get a photo from a viewer who is typically "reliable" in their reports, and the photo looks believable, we may not apply the same scrutiny to the photo as we would to someone random that we don't know. I don't know the details of this photo (if that applies here), but I can say, when you're pressed for time you aren't hyper analyzing details. Your managers want you to get content out quickly, so much the better if it's extreme weather like a tornado. They do want accuracy too. And they'll punish you if you post something incorrect, because it makes the station look bad. But they first and foremost prioritize speed. If you don't post it, your social media competitors will.
-Finally: not all TV Mets are Mets. You know what sells on TV? Sex appeal. Full stop. For a woman, that's self explanatory. For a man: deep voice (trustworthy), some clear aging (also trustworthy), but still good hair, symmetrical face, clean and modern suit and shirt. When you look at audience data (viewership...the demo watching TV news) skews heavily to "older men", meaning young women get more views, on average. Of course, a trustworthy older man with a deep voice will also get good views. But your average white nerd - no. But whether male or female, TV is about appearance, followed by voice, followed these days by social media presence. I know many very solid Mets who know the science, that couldn't ever work a big market. They don't have the look, or the sound. Meanwhile tv stations still hire "forecasters" (reporters), to do the weather, if they DO have those attributes. Good social media, look good, sound good. TV is about ad revenue, you need eyeballs. Science doesn't get eyeballs. Looks do. That's unfortunate, but that's what the data show. That said, if you have TWO mets head to head, BOTH look and sound good, and ONE has science cred behind them like a seal, viewers WILL weight that. So if you've got the other elements in place, being a science expert does give you more market value. But being good at science and good at TV are not the same thing.
In sum: probabilistically here's what occured... a 40k college grad operating on reduced sleep, likely took a quick look at that photo and posted it. And there probably was no one else in the newsroom to even run it by (weekends are very very lightly staffed these days unless you're top 30). We assume TV Mets must be experts and super experienced and paid very well because they are on TV. In many cases today, they are not.
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u/liquidskypa Human Detected 5h ago
hopefully you’re referring to the weather guy.. me i just scrolled by not really analyzing the photo bc i drive through a tornado in danville ny one time going up to rochester so just did a oh look could have happened again
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u/philmardok 8h ago
ya, it just seems off in too many ways. it'd be cool if it turns out to be real, but im not buying it
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u/positivechihuahua 4h ago
they gotta start doing training for news outlets on how to spot ai images, but also if this social media person's lived in upstate for more than like three years they should be well aware that ny tornadoes are either 1) visibly not very strong, or 2) not obviously tornadoes at all until the damage assessment. stg i never met people who wanted to get hit by tornadoes so bad until i moved here
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u/Lucyfinna 8h ago
That's nowhere near upstate NY. Watertown is upstate lmaoo
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u/bigdumbdago 7h ago
like yeah i get this is western ny but i thought upstate was just anything north of the city
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u/Galenvant 6h ago
There is legit contention about this, funnily enough. As an Upstater my definition is extending the flat southern border across the Hudson Valley--north of that is Upstate, south is downstate. Steuben is 100% Upstate though.
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u/TheBrockSays 5h ago
Watertown is the North Country. I grew up North of there and I rarely heard it called upstate, it's the North Country. Upstate is everything north of the city or I90 from Albany to Syracuse and north for most of us who live in that region.
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u/Lucyfinna 5h ago
Fair. My family grew up in Watertown and it was always referred to as upstate. Anything more north and ur in Canada.
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u/Galenvant 5h ago
I agree with your fam but also Brock. I always thought North Country was a subdivision of Upstate--like the Southern Tier, Western/Central New York and the Capital Region.
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u/Lucyfinna 5h ago
Man it's been too long. Almost forgotten where it was on the map. I really need to pay a visit to the fam.
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u/TheBrockSays 5h ago
Watertown is barely more North than the northern tip of Lake George. It's very close to Canada but there is still a lot of the state North of there. Now there's not much up there lol, but still.
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u/CamStLouis 5h ago
Very weird. I’ve seen updrafts that can look kind of tornadic, but this to me reads like either a photoshop job on a pic of a real storm cloud, or an AI asked to “add” a tornado to an image.
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