May 31, 1985, will go down as one of the largest and deadliest tornado outbreaks in this country's history, with a total of 43 tornadoes touching down in Ohio, Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and Ontario.

"It was described as organized, but organized chaos," says Richard Garuckas, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Cleveland.  

Even today, a severe weather outbreak can be fast-paced and hectic, but the technology and resources available to meteorologists 40 years ago weren't anything close to what meteorologists have available today.

"You would have had someone who would have been looking in a dark room at the radar scope seeing the signature of the storms develop and they would have been drawing what the radar looked like with a wax pencil on a piece of paper sending it to a person that was in charge of typing up warnings and the person would type up a warning and see what they were seeing," adds Garuckas. 

In 2025, severe weather information is shared over a variety of platforms, however in 1985 severe weather reports between National Weather Service offices were shared via telephone and with a tornado outbreak ongoing and phone lines down, it was impossible for Youngstown's National Weather Office to pass along what they were hearing to the Cleveland office.

"There were communication interruptions at times that slowed down getting information on what the damage was like and where it occurred. The warnings were all issued, everything was warned, and people were receiving the warnings, but in terms of hearing about what was happening, some of that was challenging," adds Garuckas. 

In 1985 sometimes there wasn't even 10 minutes of lead time for a tornado warning; now that lead time is a lot greater, sometimes over half an hour. But it's archived data on the May 31, 1985, outbreak that the NWS office in Cleveland is putting together is helping them look to the past to help better warn of severe weather outbreaks in the future.

"When this event occurred in 1985, they anticipated there was going to be severe weather, even a couple of days before, it was not a surprise that severe weather occurred. The radar technology was so primitive in those days that, in terms of the lead time you can have on tornado warnings, it was ten minutes compared to 30 or 40 minutes or longer, like today. The technology was being developed in the mid-1980s for the modern day Doppler radar, so this was really a benchmark to accelerate the process to get those modern-day Doppler radars installed as fast as possible," adds Garuckas. 

Richard Garuckas is a part of a team of meteorologists at the National Weather Service in Cleveland that, alongside other National Weather Service offices impacted by the May 31st outbreak, has created a website with a collection of archived data, survivor stories, and interactive tornado paths from that day's outbreak. If you're interested in learning more, you can follow this LINK.