After a night of storms, the honest record is a list, not a video. The Storm Prediction Center's storm reports page logs each confirmed hazard as a row — a time in coordinated universal time, a hail size written in hundredths of an inch, a county, a latitude and longitude, and a comment on how it was verified. [1]

The paper wrote on June 28 that the rainfall outlook keeps the flood threat in its own column, separating the forecast lanes so a tornado risk cannot borrow a flood's alarm. The storm reports are the other end of that same system — not what might happen, but what did, entered after the sky clears. [1][2]

The units are deliberately unglamorous. Hail coded "100" is one inch; "225" is two and a quarter inches, the size logged near Max, North Dakota on a recent night. [1] Wind is entered in miles per hour, often with a note that a trained spotter or an off-duty forecaster measured it. A hailstone next to a baseball is a photo; a diameter in a signed report is a measurement.

Tornadoes carry the strictest rule. A funnel on a phone is a report; its rating comes later, when a National Weather Service storm survey walks the damage path and assigns an Enhanced Fujita number from what the wind actually broke. [1][3] The Day 1 convective outlook graded the risk in advance; the survey grades the result, and the two are not the same document. [2][3]

That lag is the point the feed refuses. A rain-wrapped funnel clip becomes a confirmed tornado the moment it posts; a single stone becomes "baseball-sized" without a ruler. [1] Local coverage runs the most dramatic frame and stops. The checkable version is duller and truer — a diameter to the hundredth of an inch, a gust in miles per hour, a survey's Enhanced Fujita number, each tied to a place and a time. [1][3]

-- DARA OSEI, London