Easter in the Radar Gap
The places America’s warning system can’t see and the people left inside them
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On Easter morning six years ago, my mom called my sisters and I to video chat. It marked the first Easter in nearly 10 years that we hadn’t all met at my parents’ house in Mississippi to spend the day together.
I was buried in work, managing Florida’s COVID-19 data and surveillance systems, and screened the call. I was working 15 hour days running the state’s dashboard and supporting data systems by myself. I didn’t have time to eat, much less join family video chats lamenting our separation.
My job was too important, I thought. I screened her call. Apparently all of us did. She left a video message wishing us a happy Easter. She was sitting on the living room couch, a feeling of melancholy in the air.
That afternoon I was neck-deep in code, adjusting scripts the epidemiology office had abruptly shifted to a new programming language, when I ignored a call from my dad, a long-haul trucker who checked in daily even before the pandemic. I ignored his second call, too — the kind of careless habit you blame on being a millennial.
Then my grandmother called.
I lived with my grandmother at her home in Pennsylvania my senior year in high school so that I would have a real shot at schools like Syracuse. We were close, but we almost never spoke on the phone.
She’s a Jehovah’s Witness. They don’t celebrate holidays. Ever. She also lived nearly 1,000 miles away from my parents in Mississippi.
I knew when I saw her number pop up something was wrong.
“Becky, you need to call your dad. There was a tornado at the house…”
I called him immediately. His voice was tight with fear. “The house is gone. I haven’t heard from your mom.”
I developed a habit of avoiding the news during the pandemic. Seeing all the work we did undermined by Trump became exhausting.
If I had looked at the news at any point that day, I’d have known that two EF-4 tornadoes had cut across Mississippi that Easter Sunday, rare monsters even in Dixie Alley.
NOAA would later call the outbreak one of the most severe in state history. My dad told me the storm came twenty minutes after my mom had video-messaged us “Happy Easter” from the couch of the very house that no longer stood.
Neighbors had called him. The house was split in half. Her car was still in the driveway.
I told him I’d reach out to my contacts in the disaster world, see if anyone had imagery or teams on the ground. I tried to sound calm for his sake. When I hung up, I sent frantic texts and emails: Had anyone published response maps? Did rapid assessment imagery exist yet?
A friend tried to reassure me — the track didn’t look close to their house, he said. But I already knew otherwise. Hours later, news came that two people had been killed on my parents’ street, another critically injured. No word yet on my mother.
I stepped outside my own house and sat down, re-watched the Easter video. My chest felt like someone punched a hole through it. I knew I had to get back inside soon to fix the code, run the evening update. There was no one else to do it.
I spent most of that day and night believing my mother was dead. At the last minute, my mom, not hearing from any of us, decided to drive to my sister’s to visit for Easter. She left minutes before it hit.
That was Easter day six years ago.
April feels cursed somehow. This wasn’t our family’s first brush with severe weather, but it was the one that took the most from us.
Easter is no longer a holiday for me. Like August 29, April 26, and December 7, Easter for me is a day of reflection.
And this year, my parents are in more danger than ever before.
The Trump regime’s deep cuts to our nation’s atmospheric science infrastructure have already cost lives, and delayed necessary improvements to our radar coverage.
Across the United States, the illusion of seamless severe weather detection masks a quieter vulnerability in radar gaps.
These gaps are regions where the nation’s NEXRAD cannot adequately sample the lower atmosphere. These gaps are not random. They are structural, rooted in both physics and policy.
Weather radar travel in straight lines while the Earth curves away beneath them. At increasing distances from a radar site, the beam overshoots the lowest levels of the atmosphere — the very layer where tornadoes, damaging winds, and flash flooding begin.
Large geographic distances between radars, particularly in rural America, expand these blind spots. The result is not merely technical; it is inequitable. Communities in radar gaps often receive later warnings, less precise forecasts, and diminished lead times during high-impact events.
Academic assessments have repeatedly linked radar coverage limitations to degraded warning performance, especially for tornado detection and quantitative precipitation estimation. Efforts to densify the network, including proposals for gap-filling radars, have stalled amid funding constraints and competing federal priorities.
In a warming climate where extreme precipitation and severe convective storms are intensifying, these gaps are no longer peripheral. They are fault lines in the nation’s early warning system.
Radar gaps, like the ones my parents lived in, were slated for improved coverage, but have now been delayed indefinitely.
There’s a climate connection between shifting seasonal patterns in tornadic activity, too.
And all of this is happening against a background of increasing proportions of people dying in tornadoes.
If this story feels personal, it’s because it is.
I’ve lived what happens inside a radar gap — where warnings come late, data is incomplete, and decisions made hundreds of miles away quietly shape who is protected and who isn’t. This kind of reporting doesn’t come from press releases or recycled headlines. It comes from lived experience, technical expertise, and the time to dig into systems most people never see until they fail.
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I was independently analyzing and visualizing Florida's COVID data during that period, and even before your story became public I could see the fingerprints of political interference in what was being reported. Knowing what it takes to wrangle that data under normal circumstances makes what you were doing in April 2020 (alone, 15-hour days, debugging scripts mid-crisis) all the more remarkable to me. I still follow your Twitter feed, though I'll admit each post lands a little differently than your Substack work does. Pieces like this remind me why I valued what you did then and still do.