powerful winds whipped through memphis. another person died in arkansas. we want to connect with someone from mississippi. he s a storm chaser with tvn weather.com and can speak to us. mike, you were just north of the tornado, but watched it pass directly in front of you. just describe to us what that moment was like. well, you know, traffic was pretty rough on the highways because of the holiday traffic. everyone is out doing their last-minute christmas shopping and stuff like that. we had a hard time getting in position on time. and we actually weren t in the right place. we can barely see it from the north. it was wrapping rain, and it was so wide at that point, that we weren t sure it was a tornado. we thought it was rain. and then we came into the debris path on the highway, and it was a mile wide tornado. and in addition to being a mile wide, apparently this was
tornados that are like this. i don t like storms that move 65 miles per hour. this was an incredibly dangerous storm just because of the terrain of the southeast part of the united states. a lot of hills and trees and storms were moving way too fast to really manage. but we came out here and gave it a shot anyway, and our thoughts and prayers go out of the people affected by these storms. as do ours. that s mike scatlin on the line. stay safe. bringing us dramatic images. pedram javaheri joins us to talk about this. you know it s an unusual storm when it even scares the storm chasers. he talked about it being wide, but it was also long and powerful. long and powerful, and this is the time of year that you don t think about tornadoes. the united states we see 1100 of these per year in the month of december only 24 of them. the other 10,000 are occurring