August 19, 2007

Oklahoma's Secret Tropical Storm

Good morning. Oklahoma had a tropical storm overnight.

At least that's a legitimate claim that can be made, since Erin still was being classified as a tropical depression last evening before strengthening to produce sustained tropical storm force winds. Isolated surface gusts even exceeded hurricane force. [Watonga's airport station gusted to 82 mph in a thunderstorm at 745Z -- 2:45 a.m. CDT.] Pending research and postmortem study by NHC and Oklahoma-based meteorologists, I'll just call it a warm-core low for now.

What follows are excerpts from a series of messages I sent privately to others overnight. They give one atmospheric scientist's running, real-time perspective on a bizarre event that isn't going to be forgotten in meteorological circles, even if it doesn't get a lot of public airplay.

-----------
It has been impressive to watch how well this system has held together a circulation after moving inland -- indeed, looking better inland than it ever did over the Gulf in many respects.

Admittedly I had checked out for a few hours after going home tonight, then "woke up" to find all this going on. It reminds me of one of those Australian "landphoons," which are fairly rare even there, and nearly unprecedented here. Alicia is the last tropical system that was so well defined by the time it got into these parts, and it was in a steadily weakened state from being a hurricane. By contrast, Erin is stronger in many ways than it ever was over the Gulf, stronger than Alicia was at this point too, now that this LLJ (low level jet) has strengthened and mixed down to the surface.

Yesterday, Elke and I watched a small, tilted updraft with scary looking but nonrotating lowerings while we were eating lunch, and after getting to work and going through the usual routine of setting up numerous workstation loops and performing analyses, it became apparent from the large hodographs, diurnally aided buoyancy, discrete cells with some shear, and weak CINH, that an mesoscale discussion obviously was needed. About the time I started typing it, a storm over Kiowa County spun up, did some damage, and prompted a tornado warning from WFO Norman, for the next county to its N. After a few hours of this, the storm modes got less discrete and the convection started to consolidate under some cooling cloud tops with aid from this deepening/strengthening LLJ, prompting a flurry of heavy rain related products (flash flood warnings from Norman, heavy rain mesoscale discussion from me, etc.).

What went wrong was my thinking that the LLJ would weaken by now. Not so! The heavy rain threat is there, as expected, but the severe potential came back. Thanks to ridiculously high sfc theta-e, no stable layers atop the BL, and the virtual temperature correction, SBCINH<25 J/kg even at this wee hour.

As for what to call this, how about simply a low? No use categorizing this inland iteration of Erin until the inevitable round of conference then formal paper(s) are done (as so often happens with bizarre events in Oklahoma, where mesonet data allows a more precise sampling than usual). ITMT, I can say with confidence that it is warm core aloft, per 00Z 500 mb analysis but may have had some weak baroclinic tendencies down low.

Still a lot left to learn about this crazy atmosphere of ours...

-----------
None-the-less... :-)

A thought occurred to me as I was posting about this in a private forum:

As of 4 a.m. CDT, Erin still is being called a tropical depression by HPC, but has been producing tropical storm force sustained winds right here in Oklahoma. That discussion is incorrect, in that those are sustained TS force winds (as shown in this OK mesonet plot and others overnight) -- not just gusts, and not just in thunderstorms either. There also have been TS force, southeasterly inflow (not outflow) winds.

NHC cannot have the luxury to wait for conference papers or articles in the formal meteorology journals (even one with a relatively fast turnaround time like EJSSM). They'll have to classify this burst of intensification as something over Oklahoma.

How is this going to be handled in the NHC best tracks? How should it be handled?

------------

If you catch this post in the next hour or two, check out this loop showing the "eye" from OKC's terminal Doppler weather radar (TDWR):

If not, I've saved a still image from TDWR.

BTW, for those nor familiar with OK Mesonet plots like that above, those winds are not in kt, but in MPH. Still, thanks to a low-level jet that has mixed substantially down to the surface, we've had sustained, tropical storm strength gradient winds in the area from what still is a warm core low, and was a named tropical storm at one point. Call it what you will.

------------

There were a few tornado reports in the east semicircle of Erin yesterday in NW TX and W OK...nothing significant, just small/brief touchdowns...but that was more than anyone believed would occur before the event began to unfold. Check out the tornado and wind reports received so far.

Although it was east of the strongest low level wind fields, and nontornadic, a small supercell also moved just E of Norman and was photographed by Rich Thompson. Note the pronounced wall cloud in this picture.

------------
Now it's approaching 6 a.m., and I still can't go to sleep, but probably will try soon. The main spiral band is moving past me now. Surface sustained winds still are legit TS strength farther NW near the eye. Yes, eye. [See reflectivity image at top.]

Check out the base Doppler velocity image at the next scan. Classical...

Yes, you're reading it right: There are a few pixels of 60-70 kt inbound velocities just off the deck, on the south side of the eye. There were hurricane-force winds above the surface, over Calumet, Oklahoma. It's hard to believe I'm typing this.

Those who are up will be able to follow this amazing event for the rest of the morning on the Twin Lakes (Oklahoma City) radar:
OKC radar from COD
...and linked loops.

Maybe it will spin down from here on...maybe not. I've lost all confidence in my ability to predict this system and have decided to just enjoy it!

------------

655 a.m.: Geez, I need to go to bed. Bad.

Now, why am I calling this a "secret storm"? It certainly isn't going to be a secret for meteorologists...far from it! But while Elke and I were standing outside a few minutes ago marveling at this beautiful, windy, rainy weather, I realized how different media treatment would be with the very same conditions and radar imagery superimposed on South Florida and called a tropical storm. TV stations there would be going wall to wall, all night. The Weather Channel would have crews in dripping blue ponchos reporting from every nook and cranny of the area. Matt Drudge would have red-colored headlines about a tropical storm in Florida. CNN would be showing pictures of harried crowds filling shopping carts with bottled water at Publix. Panic and mayhem everywhere...live at 11!

But here in Oklahoma, it's a scientific curiosity for the semantic dickering and curious investigation of weather scientists and enthusiasts -- but for the public, merely a nuisance.

Displayed radar imagery courtesy College of DuPage

Posted by tornado at 06:53 AM | Comments (0)

August 03, 2007

On Unfortunate NHC Developments

Yesterday brought some sad news from Miami regarding the death of former NHC and HRD director Bob Burpee (Miami Herald). It was a sad story to begin with that Bob effectively had to retire from his NHC post back in '97 because of chronic and debilitating illnesses, but even more so because Bob was a genuinely likable and highly intelligent guy whose already immense contributions to the hurricane research and forecasting world were far from complete. Max Mayfield alluded to this in his online tribute to Bob (contained within his new hurricane BLOG for Channel 10 in South Florida).

I didn't know Bob as well as many folks there, since he was at HRD during my NHC tenure. But I did speak with him on his visits to NHC, thoroughly enjoyed hearing and learning from his flight stories, and vividly recall one fine party he threw sometime after Hurricane Andrew. He lived with South Florida impresario Judy Drucker in a very nice condo, perhaps 20 floors above Biscayne Bay, near Vizcaya. On the night of the party, the streets around their condo tower were flooded with salt water from the combination of stiff onshore flow and high tide, and driving through the street-turned-bay contributed to a good deal of rust that accumulated beneath my Roachmobile. [This was fine with me...just another "battle scar" for that old junk heap.] Bob and Judy were fantastic hosts, the food and drink were abundant, the view amazing, and the radar and satellite loops playing on the TV screens included some of Andrew that I haven't seen before or since. A great time...

Bob's death happens amidst the ongoing soap opera revolving around the new directorship of NHC/TPC, Bill Proenza's provocative comments directed publicly toward those above him in rank, apparently considerable internal discord, the resultant removal of Bill, and his efforts to be reinstated. What a mess!

At least 20-25 people have asked me for my insights into the whole ordeal, since I used to work there and still know several folks in that center. I wish I had some insights to offer, but the truth is I know what you know through the press reports; and we all know that the popular press cannot and should not be relied upon for the whole story in something like this.

Otherwise... Honestly, the whole thing is as much a mystery to me as anyone else outside NHC. I've been busy working, eating, sleeping and traveling, haven't spoken with my friends and colleagues there in several months since most of this unfolded. I simply don't know what in the world is really going on inside those thick concrete walls...or in Washington where some unusual and unprecedented decisions have been carried out.

I have spoken with neither Bill nor any of my forecaster friends in several months either. I'm certainly not about to bug any of them about this mess during hurricane season. They've got more important stuff to do. In due time we'll understand this whole ordeal better, but for now, let's let those guys and gals at NHC focus on doing what they do best: predicting tropical cyclones. The rest can wait.

Given that a lot of those folks are friends and respected colleagues of mine whose trust I value, even if I do learn something bizarre or amazing, don't count on my blabbing about any of it on this BLOG anyway. I care hugely about NHC and its people, and have been distressed to see this happening to them all (Bill, the forecasters, the admin folks, the computer support people...everybody there). And I refuse to "take sides" in something I know so little about.

In the meantime, Chuck Doswell has written an essay on the NHC mess that is well worth reading, and seems to capture in words what a lot of folks in the field are thinking.

What's my take for now? Simple: Let's move on! It's about damn time for the sad and bad news to end from Miami.

Whatever shakes out of the directorship soap opera, the important thing (as Max mentioned elsewhere in his BLOG) is for the NHC forecast mission to proceed with utmost support and excellence. Whether with Bill, Ed or someone else at the helm, the success of NHC's forecasting must take priority. Lives depend on it.

Posted by tornado at 05:37 AM | Comments (0)

May 16, 2007

XTREME Storm Chasing and Death

Some friends and I have been pondering the occurrence of the next storm chaser fatality. Morbid, I know, but it's something worth thinking about, much like one thinks about other tragic and terrible things that could happen in life, and how to mitigate the risk. And I don't shy away from confronting any subject -- not even the reaper. What follows are some thoughts culled from that dialog.

The fact is that none of us are immune from making a singular bad decision, and therefore, from tragic consequences. All of us have at some point, admittedly or not. I certainly have.

Then there are the nearly equally shared risks, such as lightning, black cows in the night, etc. I don't think the first CG that kills a chaser, for example, will care if the electrified flesh is that of a screaming yahoo or a well-respected "gentleman chaser." [My own track record, BTW, is at neither extreme, though I aspire to the latter.] The next chaser death could be even an esteemed "veteran" -- heaven forbid, but let's not be so arrogant as to exclude that possibility. It could be any of us!

That sobering realization doesn't and shouldn't preclude some of us from calling out those who consistently show they don't give a damn about the safety of themselves or others, thereby magnifying the hazard in an already somewhat dangerous place. Take special note of that word -- consistently. There's a difference between making a regrettable error of judgment and repeated eschewing of common sense. The former can kill you; but the latter significantly boosts those odds.

I (for one) am getting tired of this topic, after almost two decades of discussion. Problem is, it just refuses to go away...so we surely will keep revisiting it this on occasion. Other folks who care about this hobby also have been outspoken in essays, online forums and in-person speaking engagements about the hazards and traps of storm observing for many years.

The reactions invariably have been been one of three modes: agreement and acceptance, silence or defensive whining. In reverse order...

Some folks -- most often the "XTREME VIDEO" thrillseekers or their real or imaginary (aliased) allies -- scream in hollow and insecure defensiveness about chaser-elites "imposing rules" and other tired, old arguments usually revolving around an imaginary persecution of some sort. Predictably, such messages often arrive with numerous misspellings, horrid grammar and usage, and an apparent lack of awareness that the SHIFT key indeed does exist.

Silence can mean anything: agree, disagree, no opinion, don't care, care but not enough to respond, too lazy, etc. Who knows but the mute?

Of course, the encouraging part is those storm observers who have told me they appreciate the safety essays and words of advice from me and other veteran chasers over the years. I don't know how much good it's done quantitatively, but I've got abundant anecdotal evidence to suggest that some people (new chasers) have been positively influenced by those essays in their quest to learn more about storm observing.

Others, however, are tempted to compete with the XTREME VIDEO bunch because they're getting the close footage -- the "good stuff" and the only video that apparently sells anymore in an otherwise oversaturated market. This shouldn't be a competition. Ultimately it's about the storms, not us. How can that message be conveyed best so it will carry the most weight? It only becomes about us when greed and ego get in the way of learning and appreciation.

As for the screaming yahoos and their pandering concubine of semi-literate apologists... Clearly the "XTREME VIDEO" daredevils haven't listened, nor will they, because of the all powerful combination of greed and egomania. These wildmen are going to go down defiant and unapologetic, reveling in some sort of concocted "outlaw" status as a badge of honor. The persecution complex can be a powerful motivator of irrationality. There is nothing the sane can do to educate or change these yahoos' minds. It will only happen from within, if at all.

Adrenaline junkies seem to be spurred further by harrowing, horrifying experiences -- not discouraged by them. If you want any deeper insight into the "XTREME VIDEO" mentality in storm chasing, the closest you may come is to study the world of publicity-seeking motorcycle stuntmen (or in the earlier eras, escape artists)...some combination of Evel Knievel and Harry Houdini, but with both a moving platform (SUV) and target (tornado in supercell) instead. At least Evel and Harry didn't make bogus claims about saving lives in order to justify their actions, while also putting others in danger.

Is it "every man for himself" anymore? Should it be? Let's ask that of the families of any storm tourists who may be injured or killed under the watch of an unscrupulous, non-reputable, out-of-woodwork chase tour operator. Or of the grandma and grandpa whose car is t-boned in a little Nebraska town by an out-of-state SUV festooned with antennae. Or of the vacationing family of five who swerves off the road to avoid a chase van making a U-turn across a double yellow line...just over the top of the hill.

Still, what more can be said that hasn't been already? I don't know what else there is to do, except

1. Look out for our own safety and do the best we can to keep ourselves out of harm's way as much as possible. This includes keeping some distance from the throngs whenever road options and storm track are favorable.

2. Be prepared to react, both publicly and amongst ourselves, to the inevitable first few casualties of reckless behavior around storms. Some of those casualties may be innocent drivers/bystanders or other chasers not involved in dangerous behavior (collateral damage).

Agree with me or not, this is where I am with this issue right now. I'm not afraid to take a stand, to confront unpleasant topics, or to challenge people. And so it is.

One thing is for sure, mother nature isn't going to tolerate this hypercompetitive, kiss-the-vapors, XTREME VIDEO bulls___t forever without exacting a morbid price.

Posted by tornado at 10:57 PM | Comments (12)

May 09, 2007

Tornado Watch Warning Advisory Bulletin Alerts

After a rather enjoyable, but also long and tiring storm intercept on 4 May, Elke and I were glad to land in some good lodging. A young dude at the AmericInn of Russell, probably no older than 22, was manning the front desk and listening to weather radio. There was a notice on display stating that, in the event of a tornado warning, all rooms would be called and people evacuated to an interior room on the lowest level.

This was good...that is, until a couple hours later, when he called to advise that a tornado warning was in effect for Russell County and that we should evacuate. I informed him that

I am a degreed meteorologist and professional severe storms scientist,


I was watching the weather closely on my computer,


The warning barely touched extreme SE Russell County many miles from us,


The storm was not moving our way, and


The circulation probably wasn't even going to touch that part of the county.

Somewhat placated, I think he didn't call any more rooms after mine for that particular storm.

Two hours later, after I finally had gone to sleep, he called again to inform me that a "tornado warning is in effect for all of central Kansas."

Say what? I knew right away that was bogus. A quick radar check showed the main complex well E and SE, moving away, a few small junk storms to the W and NW, lots of storms near the Nebraska border (also moving away), nothing upstream, and only a watch in effect. I tried to explain, as clearly as sleep deprivation would allow, the difference between a watch and a warning, but this time it was to no avail. He insisted he heard the warning for all of central Kansas and that he was calling all rooms.

Opening doors, footsteps and slurry mutterings of interrupted sleep could be heard reverberating through the halls, as people unnecessarily filed downstairs in the middle of the night. Those folks were as unaware of the lack of danger in the area as the desk clerk was of the difference between a watch and a warning. Meanwhile I crawled back into bed and finally fell asleep for the rest of the night.

Some indefinite level of false alarms is better than being hit and hurt or killed, but the best concept is to have neither. Clearly the intent of hotel management was good in having a plan in place, but you know what they say about good intentions. Problem is, the execution of that plan was left in the hands of a scared young ignoramus.

Every year, while roaming the plains, I hear radio DJs (notorious for this!) absolutely mangle weather statements and bulletins with their own clueless misunderstanding. Just yesterday morning, while driving into work with no severe weather watches in the whole state, a lady on one of the stations I was flipping past said, "Severe weather watch is out all day today, so stay safe!" Huh? There was nothing of the sort. If anything, the major problem -- by far -- was flash flooding!

One of the most priceless examples, so extreme as to be hilarious, was in 1994 when I was watching some linear, outflow-dominant junk with an old, dying, embedded supercell in central Kansas. All warnings had expired, and the tornado watch was almost history. The DJ on a Wichita station said, "You better be careful out there, we've got one of these tornado watch warning alert bulletins goin' for the area!"

After decades of trying to educate the public on watch versus warning, there's still lots of work left to do. Sigh. Education is the solution, but it sure seems to fall two steps back for every three forward. So we keep on trying, one opportunity at a time...

Posted by tornado at 01:04 AM | Comments (3)

April 26, 2007

Chasing with Dense Hordes

Large crowds in the vicinity of tornadic thunderstorms are nothing new. This has been going on for years, with or without reckless behavior by some within these crowds.

Obviously, dangerous use of vehicles (passing on the shoulder, blocking the highway, opening doors into traffic, turning around in front of oncoming traffic, etc.) makes matters much worse, is illegal, draws adverse media and law enforcement attention to storm observing, and can and should be enforced using existing laws. I have no problem with law enforcement busting people for such violations, as long as it's consistently enforced (to include everyone: media members as well as "ordinary" chasers). It's perfectly fine also for normal drivers to report the dangerous ones, either real time or after the fact.

What is new, however, is the public and media attention now drawn to the mere presence of so many crowds. I'll link to the news stories available as of this writing, and provide fair-use excerpts below the links for when those stories expire.

From the Wichita Eagle: Reno County Tornadoes Attract Viewers, Cause No Damage

The salient excerpt:

Storm chasers turned out it in droves to watch the funnel clouds.

Jason Benz drove from Milwaukee to see the tornadoes.

"It doesn't take much to make it worth the drive," he said, watching a rotating cloud from a rural country road in Reno County. "I got hail damage about a mile up the road."

The Reno County Sheriff's Office blocked roads just south of Rice County to make sure people stayed safe.

"Everyone wants to see, and sometimes they get too close," said Deputy Sheriff Dan Bass.

Here's an even more direct indictment from the Hutchinson News: Spectators Bedevil Trained Spotters

Bill Guy saw something that scared him during Tuesday night's tornado sightings near Nickerson.

While trained spotters issued reports of eight tornadoes between Nickerson and Sterling, storm spectators lined Nickerson Road south of town and Hunter Boulevard to the north.

"I wish people would just stay home," said Guy, Reno County Emergency Management director. "Nobody's going to get rich shooting pictures of tornadoes."

Watching tornadoes fall from the clouds is not a spectator sport, Guy said, and it creates a headache for trained storm spotters and emergency response crews.

During the hour or so the storm moved over Nickerson, spotters encountered difficulty driving to their assigned locations - dozens of curious onlookers blocked their way.

Self-declared storm chasers, including curious locals who don't have much clue what they're tangling with, are joining in the fray also. The public roads allow such freedom, but it may come with a terrible price for those ignorant of storm structure and morphology. I would hate to see families with kids, especially, take part in something literally and figuratively over their heads, then drive into a tornado or get nailed by lightning as a result. This video from CNN drives that point home, even though those in it were fortunate to avoid such fates.

Still, public roads are exactly that, and as such, it's within anyone's right to drive by (or be stuck in a traffic jam at) any given spot on any given road. I don't know what can, or should, be done.

What will be done? Many storm chasers have, for a decade or more, feared legislation against storm chasing. Forget that, it's not happening. Such things may be proposed from time to time, but they will not stand the test of constitutionality. No such legislation will pass the test of right of peaceful assembly. However...existing traffic laws absolutely, positively cover all moving and parking violations, whether or not in the vicinity of storms, and easily can be enforced very aggressively. That, in some places, already is happening around storms.

What else is happening is that local officials enforcement will more often make due use of an emergency declaration (severe weather warnings qualifying as such) to disallow entry into sections of roadway or perhaps an entire county. It already has happened -- in the news above, and even as far back as 3 May 1999 at Union City OK -- and will become more and more common. So be it. By becoming so numerous, storm observers have brought this upon themselves (ourselves).

Unfortunately, cops are humans too, and no more or less prone to stupidity and overreaction than the population at large, and it has happened (re: Briscoe County TX, 28 March 7). Fortunately I wasn't witness to some of that bizarre and inexplicable behavior, as were quite a few other storm observers. Most law enforcement folks are doing a fine job under some really tough circumstances, but face it: There are bad apples in the batch. We'll sometimes see that.

Are there ways around all of this? Yes, for some, and on occasion.

Requiring some sort of official credentials by local law enforcement to pass a certain point (in a declared emergency) would thin the crowds. Selfishly, that's OK with me, because I already have credentials that are accepted for passage in most areas and situations. Not all, but most...and that's fine. If I don't pass, I'll just circumnavigate elsewhere, probably 10-20 miles downshear, and wait. If I do get through, great. I won't feel sorry for those who don't have acceptable credentials, either, because everyone in this country (from birth) has the opportunity to get the kind of training and education it takes to earn them.

Otherwise, thoughtful storm observers ought to consider dispersing themselves ahead of the crowds whenever roads and time permit. Find a good observing location down-vector from the projected path, watch from a distance at first, and let the storm approach. It will enhance one's enjoyment of the event, reduce the aggravation of having to deal with so many other people (at least for a little while) and cut the stress of constant driving. Sometimes I've been able to have success avoiding the hordes this way, positioning 15-20 miles ahead of the storm, perhaps in the next county, and ahead of any potential law enforcement blockades. This offers a more distant view for awhile, but I don't mind. My goal is just to appreciate the storm in as peaceful a manner as possible -- not to compete with others, touch the vortex vapors, or get "XTREME TORNADO VIDEO."

Finally, if you know of wanton, dangerous actions by other chasers or spotters, do NOT stick your head in the sand and tolerate that. Morally and ethically, even if not legally, to do so is tantamount to condoning and conspiring in reckless public endangerment, and makes those who know of such behavior every bit the dangerous criminal as those actually doing it. Stand up for what's right, don't be a chickensh_t! Report that stuff and bust those who do it. I will not hesitate to, and I absolutely don't care who I offend as a result. The greater good is more important.

Posted by tornado at 11:28 PM | Comments (7)

April 06, 2007

New Springtime of Old

It has been a busy spring! The hemispheric upper air pattern has set up such that fairly strong synoptic waves have been crossing the western and central U.S. in a way that allows a deep, moist boundary layer to return from the gulf on a fairly regular basis, in turn assisting in the severe weather outbreaks that have erupted between the southern Plains and Mid-South regions. This is quite unlike previous few years, when the upper air wavelength was too short and/or the phase speed too fast and/or the Hudson Bay vortex anchored an eastern PNA (persistent negative anomaly), any of which keeps robust moisture from returning anywhere near here.

What excites me, besides the moisture, is how far west in longitude it has been returning so far. I observed a supercell tapping a marginal, narrow moist sector in the east part of the TX Panhandle in February. In March, on a day I couldn't chase due to work, we even had a small cluster-outbreak of tornadoes from a couple of supercells in extreme east New Mexico, with a killer tornado near Clovis. That, along with the casualties since, is the unfortunate side of this pattern, the good side being much needed precipitation to areas dessicated by drought.

Last week, on 28 March, a couple of my colleagues joined me for one of the most crazy and memorable storm intercept trips I can imagine, seeing at least six tornadoes from two supercells in one county of the Panhandle. That was only a small part of a major tornado outbreak, the likes of which are seldom seen so far west, so soon in the year.

With other storm intercepts in southeast Nebraska (coinciding with a preplanned trip up thataway) and near Del Rio (coinciding with a preplanned trip down thataway), this has been an unprecedentedly active season for me, for the period prior to April.

Perhaps most importantly, the rain is back in central OK. This hemispheric pattern is good for giving us the sort of synoptic- to shortwave-trough action suitable for period of most welcome rains. Now please note that it will take quite a bit more rain to recover our long-term (two year) deficit, where we're still behind over 20 inches, but it is encouraging to see moist ground, creeks flowing and pond levels risen almost full. Even Lake Thunderbird (large reservoir with a small watershed) has come up a couple feet, but it still is much closer to the record low than to normal pool elevation.

The synoptic pattern temporarily has transitioned to an eastern trough, bringing us a nasty cold snap that threatens to break low temperature records and freeze off all the newly minted tree leaves. At my place, we'll lose a lot of flowering plants and perhaps even a couple of fruit tree saplings, if they can't regrow their leaves.

But longer term progs indicate more high amplitude waves crossing the western CONUS, the first of which may "only" bring us rain later next week, thanks to recycling of cold boundary layer air from the ongoing regime. Or it may bring some severe storms, especially south of here in TX. We shall see. ITMT this is a most welcome large scale pattern shift from the past few years, and reminds me of what springtime in the southern Plains should be like. I'm encouraged for the remainder of the early-middle spring.

Posted by tornado at 09:37 PM | Comments (2)

March 15, 2007

New Book on the 3 May 99 Tornado Outbreak

Remember the 3 May 1999 outbreak? The inevitable book on it finally has arrived. Oklahoma born journalist Nancy Mathis' new tome, Storm Warning: The Story of a Killer Tornado, has hit the streets, courtesy of Touchstone Publishing (a unit of Simon and Schuster). This book arrives just in time for chase season and is sure to stir interest among severe storms enthusiasts.

Storm Warning is a little different from many weather related books, in a good way. In a note to me, Nancy once summarized her motivation very succinctly, as follows. I don't think she would mind my sharing:

My goal in this whole enterprise was to try to tell the story of this amazing event, the people it affected and how people like you and your colleagues saved lives, probably hundreds of them, based on the decades of work by people like Fujita, Doswell, Burgess and Crawford and all the others.

By in large, I think the author succeeded, whereas so many other writers of severe weather stories have fallen into the tar pits of gross inaccuracy, wild sensationalism, irrelevant and tangential commentary, mythical pseudoscience, or unsubstantiated speculation. Nancy, showing a highly uncommon degree of concern for a nonscientific journalist, tried very hard to get facts straight and make sure scientific concepts weren't being misrepresented or butchered.

The story does digress for a good while into the Woodward tornado of 9 Apr 1947, and into the life and times of Ted Fujita, but those are worthy subjects of diversion. If it seems at times that the writing isn't wild and scintillating, it's probably because she's not making stuff up just to keep the reader hooked. Instead, she's trying to portray the truth of the event and the background of the folks involved, some of which indeed is stranger than fiction. I could tell from the time she first came to Norman to interview several of us connected to that outbreak that this was going to be different -- in a worthy way -- from most "storm stories." As such, I offered to help her to "get it right," and she took me up on it.

I did assist with proofreading for the book and was an occasional subject. As such, I won't do a full review here or elsewhere, because I'm not independent enough from the effort. Nevertheless I can assure you that, while it didn't come out perfect in every way, it's a far cry better done than the overwhelming majority of tomes I've seen devoted to severe weather events, victims of violent weather, storm chasers, and/or severe storms scientists. This book devotes a good deal of coverage to each, and is well worth the money and trouble to order from an online source or purchase in person at your local bookstore.

Storm Warning will appeal most to storm connoisseurs, anyone interested in Oklahoma history, natural disaster stories or lay science writing.

Posted by tornado at 03:37 AM | Comments (4)

March 12, 2007

Harold Edry: 1957 Okie Storm Chaser?

Here's a nostalgic old radio excerpt, courtesy Canadian Broadcasting Company, where a CBC reporter followed a storm spotter or chaser in Oklahoma back in 1957.

The commentary is priceless! Of course, one can catch several old myths in the broadcast, but some of the other insights actually are remarkable for the day.

I wonder if the city of Edmond still produces a plat map showing all "storm cellars." A "cow's udder without any teats" preceding the tornado sounds like one of the most distinctive wall cloud descriptions I've heard. I dare other storm observers to record that description on their videos this season. >:-)

It's neat to hear Edry describe how he can "feel tornado weather" in light of something that happened to Rich, Elke and me on 15 May 3, in Shamrock. As we were loading the car to head to (and eventually N of) AMA, a couple of good ol' boys in overalls, hauling hay, drove by us and hollered, "Y'all are gonna see a big 'un today. I can FEEL it!" [I think Rich muttered something about Deliverance; I was reminded of the Dukes of Hazzard.]

That ol' boy was right. Just a couple hours later we were observing the wide tornado NW of Stratford (along with "Hailstone" Jim Leonard, Tim Samaras, and numerous others). That whole day was a surreal experience for Rich, who got off shift at 8 a.m., woke up in the back of the car at Shamrock to see Howie staring down at him (smiling), and uttered several memorable chase quotes from the deep catacombs of sleep deprivation.

As for the old CBC broadcast, I wonder if anyone today ever has heard of "storm expert" Harold Edry? I suspect he probably was an old-timey spotter from that era.

Thanks to Pat from Winnipeg for bringing that link to my attention.

Posted by tornado at 11:21 PM | Comments (0)

February 24, 2007

Open Season on Great Plains Supercells

Yesterday (2-23) I went on the first storm observing trip of the season, and my earliest "storm chase" in any year, a jaunt with Ryan Jewell and Rich Thompson to the southeastern Texas Panhandle. We observed a messy but interesting supercell for a couple hours before sunset.

It was more than a bit odd to be cruising past dormant grass, leafless trees and barely above-ground winter wheat on the way to the beckoning dryline; but when a day off that's devoid of immovable commitments coincides with a potential for visible supercells, it's imperative for me to get out there, no matter what the calendar says!

Once the novelty of intercepting storms in February wore off, the trip was much like the old "first chase" days of yore -- more often than not trips toward the SW down I-44 and US-62 out of Lawton. That's a route I almost can do blindfolded given the hundreds of times I've trekked it on storm days during the past 22 years. Despite that familiarity, every season-opening run down through those parts calls up the same sense of anticipation as the first ones back in the '80s: the long-awaited birth of a new storm season now underway, the unknowns of adventures to come, that edgy little burst of anticipation of the first deep dryline towers in the western sky. All this builds as the Wichita Mountains, one by one, pass bow-to-stern off starboard, the Plains open up, the skies get bigger, the horizons expand farther. Best of all, a passionate friendship with the ceaseless grandeur of the Great Plains itself renews again as old companions should -- right where it left off before, just on a new day.

Whatever the 2007 storm observing season may reveal, we'll be here to share it, once again and every time. We may see no tornadoes or dozens. We may chase through New Mexico, Illinois, Montana, Minnesota or some or none of the above. We may see giant wedges, fleeting gustnadoes, or neither. We may spend hours amongst crooning songbirds and waving wheat as a sculpted Colorado supercell drifts slowly by. Perhaps we'll instead hammer hard through the woods and hills of eastern Oklahoma or Wisconsin on another "chainsaw chase," for a fleeting glimpse of that elusive "tree thrower" tornado. Maybe a huge nighttime supercell will march across the northern sky somewhere over Kansas or Nebraska, flickers and tendrils of lightning stabbing inward and skyward from its massive cylindrical cloud structure that best resembles a gigantic cable spool. Perhaps, somewhere between Clovis and Hereford, the sunset sky will shine utterly ablaze with mammatus -- golden, then orange, then deep crimson -- above the sweet earthy smell of rain-soaked soil and the celebratory chorus of thousands of western meadowlarks. Who knows? The only guarantee is that we'll experience things we never have before, in the process learning that much more about storms, land, sky and life.

Join Elke and me for both prosaic and pictorial recollections of every storm intercept sojourn, as in the past few seasons, through our storm observing BLOG: Storms Observed This Year. 2007's first entry is online, with photos, and the other entries still are there too from since we started that BLOG.

Posted by tornado at 10:38 PM | Comments (0)

February 01, 2007

Dangers of Forecasting by Model Consensus

Numerical ensemble forecasting has proven to be a wonderful development in many (probably all) facets of operational meteorology, including predicting those patterns which yield the right ingredients for severe storms from hours to days into the future. I love using model ensembles, and they have become a very helpful, indeed almost indispensable, part of my toolbox once due diagnostics have been completed. [In the interest of space, I'll spare my usual rant about having deepest possible understanding of the current state of the atmosphere before proceeding to model guidance of any sort!]

Refer to an earlier BLOG entry for a lengthy discourse about ensembles and the future of human forecasters. Now we'll look at an example or two to illustrate an important point: Beware the *incorrect* mean or consensus, and know when the outlier is best!

The May 2006 NOAA Atlantic seasonal hurricane forecast provides lessons for all in using ensemble guidance. The initial prediction from May was for 13-16 TCs, 8-10 hurricanes and 4-6 major hurricanes, with 80% probability of an above-normal season. This was a gross overforecast, partly because the seasonal CPC ENSO forecast underpredicted the ENSO warming. Even the revised prediction ( issued in August after El Niño began and three storms into the season), was for 12-15, 7-9 and 3-4 respectively, and an 75% chance of an above-normal season...still overdone.

The forecast of warm Atlantic SST (consistent with our temporal position in the AMO cycle) apparently was fine, but the rapid transition into an El Niño SST regime in June, and its associated upper tropospheric kinematic anomalies, wrecked the potential for an active season. The climatic ENSO forecast models blew chunks, the consensus forecast being near neutral (a.k.a. "La Nada"). Importantly, the only verifying member was on the far upper end of the spaghetti plot.

There's a message here for all forecasters who use any kind of ensemble guidance: Outliers sometimes are the most correct, i.e., sometimes the solution on the far left or right, or high or low, really does verify much better than the middle or average.

Think back, for example, to college forecast contests where even the most aggressive operational model prog of a frontal position still failed to surge it far enough south, and your temp forecast got blasted to smithereens, your error scores bloated more than I get after eating too many bean burritos. An ensemble extreme in that case probably would have been the best model forecast to use as guidance in making your real forecast -- not the ensemble mean or "consensus." Clearly the extreme outlier verified as the highest probability forecast...because it happened!

Whatever the scale of the forecast, from mesoscale to SREF to seasonal and beyond, the nagging question is: How do you understand when and especially why a far-flung string of prognostic spaghetti will be the one to kick butt? There lies a crucial role of the human forecaster in the ensemble era!

As I once said the aforementioned BLOG essay: "Pretend for a minute that ensembles of 20 years from now will provide a range of forecasts for specific supercells and tornadoes. The next 3 April 1974 type outbreak is forecast by a gross outlier...and happens! If one of the lowest-probability and most ridiculous looking ensemble extremes for that day had been a forecast of over 140 tornadoes, it would have been highly unwise to discard it!"

One apparently safe path is to forecast the consensus all the time and simply swallow or ignore the missed extremes. Your scores will be great, on average, no matter how many people were inconvenienced or even killed, or how many hundreds of millions of dollars in damage occurred in the few missed events. Does your scientific and moral conscience permit this to be acceptable? Most managers probably will, at least if the missed event didn't hit a politically sensitive target or cause mass casualties.

As long as your forecasts didn't happen to include the fatal events -- a fluke of happenstance -- managerial bean-counters who place too much value in objective verification numbers as indicators of forecast value (and there are many, unfortunately) will love you. You may even get rewards for what is termed "superior performance." Such "success" is hollow -- performance without understanding, style without substance, an emperor without clothes. And it will come back to haunt you when the biggest day of your career hits and you fail to nail it because

It is too far from the ensemble consensus and


You don't have the physical and conceptual understanding that gave you the confidence to deviate off that erroneous consensus.

[Herein also lies the pitfalls of human "collaboration" in forecasting. More on this in another stream of spew, coming soon!]

Maybe the really devastating event is just a once or twice-a-career occurrence. Isn't that what we're paid as forecasters to get right when it counts the most, though -- the rare and extreme event that can affect many lives? It is, after all, the firehouse analog to the legendary, 7-alarm chemical fire in a populated area. If we put out everyday house fires well when nobody's home, that's good, but only until we totally drop the ball on the "big one."

My dad once said that, no matter how tough you are, there's somebody out there who can whip you. Same goes for forecasting and the events we predict. Every forecaster, just like every fighter, is going to get his @ss kicked sometime if he keeps at it long enough. It's the nature of the beast. Ask any old-timer forecaster, especially at a national center, and you'll get a horror story of the biggest miss of their career. There are a few who won't be available for asking because they changed careers after such a disaster. This is about doing one's best to deliver the butt whipping to the big bad foe instead of taking it.

Finally, quoting from the previous essay, I'll reiterate another reason for knowing when to buck the consensus trend, then having the balls to do so: the inevitable automation of "routine" forecasting. "If you want to stay relevant as a forecaster in the next decade or so, get good at predicting extremes and rare anomalies." The best means to that end is scientific understanding of the processes behind those anomalous but career-making (or -destroying!) events.

Are you a forecaster? If yes, do you want a meaningful job in the future? Then heed these warnings. Consensus guidance and ensemble solutions are your friends, to be sure, but as we know, friends sometimes can screw up and do terrible things that hurt us. Treat ensemble progs wisely, with due vigilance for the potentially correct outlier, instead of as the meteorological equivalent of a brain-damaging sedative.

Posted by tornado at 10:06 PM | Comments (0)

January 31, 2007

Reluctantly Taking the Bait

Comments on the Heidi Cullen AMS Certification Controversy

For years I've tried to tried to resist the temptation to jump publicly into the "global warming" (GW) fray in general, and lately, the Cullen BLOG eruption in particular, under the attitude that:

1. I've got better things to do with my time (still true, alas...sigh!) and

2. Climate models do not and should not paramaterize the tornado. GW and severe local storms (e.g., the tornado) are so far apart in scope, scale and physical process that, given current understanding (and lacks of understanding) of each, no physical relationship between them has been established; and IMHO, any claim of one is insane. If you have rock-solid data to show otherwise, you know what they say in Missouri...

Ultimately, however, when it comes to my attempts to avoid the temptations of any atmospheric science controversy, it's likely that resistance is futile. :-)

I made the following statements in reply to my friend and colleague Jim LaDue's initial Offload BLOG post on the topic, but they can can stand alone outside the context of that to which I was responding.

------------

So Heidi advocates that one must “understand” (a no-so-subtle euphemism for “advocate” or “agree to”) an AMS statement to get AMS certification? Rubbish! Her comment was badly stated at best, irresponsible scientific fascism at worst.

Denying any form of credentials to a scientist who doesn’t agree to *any* given theory violates one of the most fundamental tenets of science: Skepticism without fear of repercussion. As Jim pointed out nicely in his BLOG entry, there are legitimate scientific skeptics regarding the degree of anthropogenic influence on climate. In fact, every scientist whose published solution differs from another’s by any amount is, by intrinsic virtue of that difference in results, a skeptic of the others’ numbers.

And it seems far more scientists in this field need to become skeptics of their *own* results. I’ve seen very little of this healthy attitude from any flavor of the “global warming” (really, a misnomer, as Kerry Emanuel recently pointed out) arguments.

I have no solid position yet because I have neither the expertise nor the credentials in the subspecialty of anthropogenic climatology to judge the various arguments put forth as to the relative influence of unnatural emissions on global thermal adjustment. I’ve read some papers; that’s it.

I do know, however, that this branch of science still is in its early infancy…a highly immature field of study with many more decades of observational data still to be collected, and many more teraflops worth of simulations to be run thereon. Let it play out…let science keep being done — preferably without contamination by either liberal or conservative politics. [The predominance of the former *in* science is as disturbing as of the latter outside of science, also recently discussed by Kerry.]

Maybe the skeptics are a flat-earth society, maybe not. ‘Til we find out beyond the most remote probability of doubt, she should be advocating open-mindedness, which is the very opposite of her proposal of effective censorship through coercive adherence to “consensus” groupthink.

------------

That was my Offload comment verbatim. For clarification, I don't blindly buy into nor endorse everything Kerry stated in his lengthy essay, but he brought up many important points in a very eloquent way. Folks interested in sifting through the roaring cacophony of extremist (left and right!) GW banter should read Kerry's editorial for as balanced of a perspective, as close to the middle ground, as I've seen -- sure to piss off both radical liberals and staunch conservatives who are unwilling to fully compartmentalize their political opinions from their scientific work!

And I might just have more to say in the future about a spinoff issue that doesn't necessarily have to do with GW, but which Kerry astutely brought up: A strong perception -- which I have as well -- of leftist "intellectual homogeneity" in science. More on that soon too.

Posted by tornado at 10:31 PM | Comments (2)

January 30, 2007

For Deep Appreciators of the Sky

This is an absolutely stunning compilation, for anyone who loves time lapses of the sky. They picked great music for it, too. With no distractions, immerse yourself...

Antarctic Time Lapses on YouTube

It's the most moving weather related video I've seen in a long, long time, and no words ever are spoken. It's best watched at least twice.

Thanks to Cactus Jack for sending this one around to a list that included me. It's also a healthy reminder that I ought to get off my butt next offseason and compile into time lapses some of dozens upon dozens of tripodded video segments of severe storms that I've shot -- and not even watched -- over the last 8 years or so. [My overwhelming emphasis has been still photography, as most folks who know me already have figured out.]

Posted by tornado at 10:33 PM | Comments (0)

December 15, 2006

Never Scrape Ice Again

Sometimes parking outdoors under the threat of freezing rain, sleet or snow is unavoidable. The simple solution to the problem is this: Don't let it happen! How? Easy...

Simply get a plastic tarp that is big enough, cover the windshield with it after parking, and shut the two front doors on the tarp to hold it in place. Make sure the tarp covers the entire windshield plus some of the adjoining top and hood, and is tightly held down by the closed car doors. Then stroll indoors merrily and without worry.

When you leave, simply open your doors, pull the tarp, vigorously shake off all the frozen accumulation (downwind from the vehicle), fold or roll it up, and cram it back into the trunk for future use. This takes far less time than scraping and is more fun. If your car needs to be warmed up, the motor can be started before dismounting, shaking and stowing the tarp.

The tarp itself won't cost much more than an ice scraper, and is so much easier to deal with! Barring a forgetful event or two, it has been many, many years since I have had to scrape ice or snow off my windshield. Imagine the cumulative savings in time, effort and hassle! As a man of the low latitudes, I abhor the very concept of scraping ice off a car windshield. I've got better things to do, such as get in and drive to a warmer place.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing, however, is that so few others do this. During the recent winter weather event here in Norman, in the entire National Weather Center parking lot, I counted precisely one out of over 100 cars that was so protected. Guess which one. I don't understand why, because I'm no smarter than most of these other folks. Mind you, this was in a parking area for a building stuffed with meteorologists and meteorology students! I was absolutely astounded that nobody else was doing this.

Unless you love scraping ice, give the tarp solution a shot. There won't be any regrets.

Posted by tornado at 07:14 AM | Comments (2)

December 14, 2006

Fallacy of Measuring Snowfall

"How much snow did you have?"

I was asked this question often after the Nov. 29-30 winter weather event, and my answer consistently was the same: "It doesn't matter. What does matter was the liquid equivalent, which was 1.31 inches."

Somehow even my fellow atmospheric scientists seemed dissatisfied with that answer, which puzzles me because it is the most scientifically meaningful.

Based on the measurement attempts about which I have read and heard, the winter storm here in Norman left around 1/4 inch of freezing rain ice, followed by perhaps a half inch to inch of sleet, layered further under 4-7 inches of snow. Of course, the snow depth measurements varied greatly, not only across town but even on a small plot of land, thanks to blowing and drifting. This has been a common problem ever since snow measurements first were collected way back in the pre-electronic era.

The customary way to report snow depth has been and remains to do an average of several readings -- but how many, and where? Inconsistency in sampling sizes and methods is a major detriment to climatological analysis of snowfall records; yet the detriment is immeasurable because of the lack of rigorous documentation on how each and every snow depth reading was attained.

Another longstanding problem with snow depth reporting and data is that the snow "dryness" varies greatly, such that fine powder of 10 inches melts down to a smaller amount of water than heavy, wet snow that was formed in very moist environments that barely were cold enough to sustain ice crystal growth and maintenance of those crystals to the surface. Ten inches in Aspen in February probably won't yield the same runoff as ten inches in San Antonio in March.

The problem distills to this: Snow depth measurements are arbitrary, inconsistent, misleading and hugely unscientific way to represent fallen winter precipitation.

The solution, as is so often the case, is shockingly simple: Stop doing it! Quit measuring and recording snow depth. Instead, as with rain, collect the precipitation in a capable gauge, in an open exposure. Then melt it. The liquid equivalent is what really counts anyway for hydrological purposes. Liquid equivalent is what goes into the official precipitation records, and for good reason. Why even bother with snow measurement at all, unless you run a ski resort? It's a waste of time and effort.

For performing melted equivalents, heated tipping-bucket gauges exist. The standard old removable-top gauges work well for this purpose when a heated gauge isn't affordable or practical. I've got one of the latter, which funnel rain into an inner plastic pipe and let overflow pour into a surrounding outer pipe. For upcoming winter precip, the funnel-cap and inner pipe can be pulled in less than two seconds. All precip then can be collected in the outer pipe for later melting and measuring (by pouring back into the scaled inner pipe). This is a perfectly valid tactic because the circumference of the funnel cap and outer pipe are the same. This means the horizontal plane through which the precip falls is the same, with or without the funnel and inner pipe; therefore, the same amount of any precip will fall into the gauge either way.

The hard part may be to remember to pull the funnel and inner pipe. This must be done, because clumps of freezing and frozen precip will clog the narrow opening, causing the funnel to overflow and/or snow collected in the funnel to blow out again, forever undervaluing the measurement.

If you don't measure precipitation, none of the above may mean much. But if you do, make it matter and melt it.

Posted by tornado at 03:22 AM | Comments (5)

November 16, 2006

Reflections on the Severe Storms Conference

The 23rd SLS Conference is over, the posters packed away, the speakers and attendees back home again, the hotel again devoid of meteorology chatter. After several days to catch up on things since returning, and to reflect on the meeting, I must say it was a success, largely to the credit of those listed way down below. I posted some "insider" thoughts a few weeks before the conference, but now, I can look back on it with a sense of shared accomplishment (see credits below) and aims pretty much achieved. The conference basically ran itself, with no major logistical glitches or on-site mishaps, which was a prime goal in planning this gig from day one.

A little luck helps too, because while foresight and preparation prevents mistakes that are the responsibility of the conference organizers, a dollop of good luck still helps to avoid nasty problems imposed from without. It takes just one or two really crappy experiences to ruin the conference for a lot of folks, and we seem to have avoided such a fate. For example, the weather in the Midwest in November can be cold, icy and blustery, but wasn't. Only a little mist and light rain occurred on the first couple of days, and actually made for some curious and photogenic scenery (above). A bunch of people could have gotten sick from bad food, but didn't. An attendee could have been mugged, robbed and shot in the most dangerous city in America, casting a pall of tragedy, fear and menace over the affair, but it didn't happen. Yes, luck -- for which nobody can claim any credit -- does matter.

Another prime goal was to get lots of students and young scientists there -- not just attending, but involved. I think that worked too. We had nearly 50 student presenters, and several of us who were there all week still are in the process of collectively evaluating their poster and oral presentations for "best of" cash awards for each category. We had several young scientists as first time session chairs and many others as first time presenters also.

I didn't poll for age, but a subjective guess is that the average age of this conference was way down from any previous ones. These young people are the future bedrock of our science, and it is so important to get them integrated and active in exchanging ideas with each other as well as with their senior colleagues. As I indicated in the welcome message, from this conference's roster will emerge some individuals who, 30 years from now, will be looked upon by yet another generation of young scientists as their "giants" of severe storms meteorology, much as my own generation does now when looking back on preprint volumes from the 70s and 80s containing the early work of Alberty, Brown, Burgess, Davies-Jones, Doswell, Johns, Klemp, Lemon, Rotunno, Weisman, and others.

As for the quality of the science itself, I can only speak for my own impression: It was pretty damn good for an SLS conference. The roster of presenters did their part overall to make this a scientifically robust meeting, with lots of promising projects and concepts now in their infancy, many of which will come to fruition and land in formal journals in coming years.

Sure, there were a few of the usual single-event radar case studies or rehashing of old data that basically serve little more than to punch somebody's ticket. Sure, there were some of the usual "we really have no results yet" submissions and projects which cover nothing particularly useful. However, it seems that such content was much smaller in proportion to the "good stuff" than in some prior conferences. I appreciated the lack of superficial fluff, and deeply thank the authors for taking their work and their presence there seriously.

Could this be, in part, because we decided to hold the conference in what one prominent, boycotting researcher derisively called a "boring Midwestern city," instead of in some posh or exotic resort locale, meaning that a higher proportion of those who showed up would be there for the right reason (the science)? I suspect so. Scientists who like to treat conferences as expense-paid vacation junkets wouldn't get too stoked about St. Louis in November. My response: Great! Properly motivated folks always make any meeting a much more pleasant and educational endeavor. One thing that was not lacking among the many attendees I spoke with was enthusiasm and a genuine desire to be there and to share their findings and insights, and to learn from each other. That, truly, is what scientific conferences are about. To that end...mission accomplished.

I do wish more folks had submitted manuscripts, though. "Extended abstract" submissions were down for this conference, which was a disappointment to me and several others. Plain and simple: If a project isn't worth taking the effort to write a preprint paper for, it isn't worth presenting at a conference! To that end, I will support a small but growing movement within the AMS to restrict presentations to those who actually bother to submit a conference preprint paper. And if an independent severe storms conference ever gets organized, I'll support the same stipulation for it as well.

Attendance was down in absolute numbers compared to previous SLS conferences, but one must remember that those were jointly held with other conferences which boosted the total presence. Normalize for that factor, and our attendance actually was comparably robust -- despite intense budgetary restrictions imposed on the NOAA contingent for travel to such things under a federal continuing resolution.

The conference banquet was absolutely fantastic! Instead of the usual "AMS chicken" and boring speaker, we had tons of table conversation amongst friends and colleagues over some great food and drink. ["AMS chicken," for the uninitiated, is a recurring and bland little item most closely resembling compacted sawdust. I didn't miss it.] There was veal, halibut and more, catered by a fine St. Louis restaurant (Kemoll's), all served 43 stories aloft at "Top of the Met," with a fabulous view of downtown and the Arch. I've gotten all sorts of great feedback on this, and all the credit goes to Alan Shapiro for finding that venue and setting it up under AMS budgetary limits. He volunteered early, eagerly and "out of the blue" to handle this aspect of the conference planning, and I'm so glad we took him up on his generous offer. Great job Alan! That set a standard for conference dinners that will be damn near impossible to exceed.

---------

So, in summary, there were some minor disappointments, but they paled -- by far -- next to the successes. The conference worked, and seemed to work well. When anyone goes through as much effort as is needed to organize such a thing, such results are about as good as one can hope for.

The co-chairmen for the next conference, whose preliminary time frame is around Feb. 2009, will be Matt Parker and David Dowell. Those guys have the difficult task of assembling a functional and enthusiastic conference committee, followed by working on and with that committee to locate and organize the conference. Though I am not particularly confident in the AMS to allow them good options for the purposes of holding registration costs steady, I am confident that Matt, David and crew will do the best they can given the logistic and economic constraints imposed on them by AMS. Any ideas and suggestions should be directed to either of those guys.

Last but not least I need to publicly thank some more people who helped this conference succeed: the rest of the conference committee, which included Matt and David, as well as Dave Blanchard, Lon Curtis, Paul Markowski, and Yvette Richardson; Cara Campbell from AMS, who helped to set it up from that end and who put up with my bullheadedness and pestering; Chuck Graves for his moving tribute to the late, great Jim Moore; Chuck's recruited SLU student volunteers, who helped run the computers and freed up session chairs to proctor the sessions without having to do timekeeping; Jenni Teittinen from Finland for her keynote talk on European severe weather; Greg Stumpf, Jim LaDue and Dave for organizing the video and slide presentations; and most of all, everybody who did show up. This was your conference. All I did was direct a little traffic.

Those who missed the conference: You missed a good one.

Posted by tornado at 12:26 PM | Comments (3)

October 12, 2006

More From the Dry Hole

Back in early December, I wrote of the early stages of the "dry hole" we've been dealt, and I'm sorry to report there has been no substantive relief.

The rain gauge readings so far this year offer a digital dossier of the drought's insidious grip: "event" amounts like .08, .26, .04, .06, .31, .10, maybe a .50 if we're very lucky. That's fine for El Paso (which, BTW, has had more rain than much of central Oklahoma this year). But we're not in the Chuhuahuan desert, at leats not geologically. These are spits of "junk rain" that evaporate within a day or less, don't soak deeply, don't fill bodies of water, and only serve to pad rain stats in misleading and utterly useless ways.

We've been on the edge of numerous big-rain producers for west Texas, northeast OK, Kansas, north Texas, and southeast Oklahoma this year. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard thunder from my house, only to get no rain, or very little.

Watching blobs of precipitation on radar, in every compass direction, weaken as they approach -- or tease us with their sprinkly edges over and over and over again -- is not my idea of meteorological ecstasy. It's an inverse of Chinese water torture: Oklahoma drought torture. See the rain to the west today, to the northeast tomorrow, to the southeast next week, to the northwest the following week! It hasn't been a single bad pattern that has done this either, but instead, a dumb-luck combination of six to ten different synoptic regimes known to keep us dry, and several others that typically give us rain but have failed in each instance.

Folks who live just a few east of me, such as fellow forecasters Rich Thompson and Jack Hales, are in the absolute dry hole near Lake Thunderbird, east of the develped part of Norman, and have fared worst, with total hovering around 15 inches for this year as of this writing. Some of us now are running a 30+ inch deficit in the last 21-24 months (that's almost one whole year's worth of rain mising here in under two years!). We're to the point that even a seemingly big rain of an inch, or two, or three (!), will make only the most feeble dent in the long term water deficit. We need multiple, huge, flooding events, over the course of months, to break this drought.

Someday we'll catch up again, typically in spectacular fashion. Until then, however, it's not looking good for fans of storms and rain, like me.

The NOAA Palmer Drought Index graphic is one indicator of the dire situation we're facing, and another is the condition of the lakes and ponds. Lake Thunderbird now sits at an all-tame low water level since its construction in the 1960s, at over 7 feet down. Where water used to cover lake bottom, armadillos now roam past freshly sprouted crabgrass.

Much of my neighborhood used to be a golf course a few decades ago. Some of its ponds now are at levels not seen since at least the 1950s. I could walk over to them right now and collect hundreds of golf balls if I wanted. Some of the cracks in the mud are massive, reaching 2-4 inches across and even deeper than that, the crust hard as brick, the waterline withered far from the usual banks.

[This was to my happy advantage (21-inch largemouth bass) while fishing the other day, however. I could stand and cast where the inner weedlines normally reside, thereby avoiding the weeds altogether!]

A mid-upper level low now offshore from southern California is expected to eject ENE across the southern Rockies early next week. As this happens, a broad plume of subtropical middle-level moisture from the Pacific, and the NW fringe of a return fetch of low level mosture from the Gulf, should spread across much of New Mexico and west Texas. Some folks out in those parts are in for (another) good soaking. Will we be too far east, and get shafted on rainfall again? The devil indeed is in the details, and it's too far out to give details this soon.

In the meantime, the kids and I probably will do a combined scavenger hunt and photography expedition of our own (following in Rich's footsteps) on the dried-up mudflats of Thuderbird sometime this weekend before the rain chances do commence and we get our next, token .21-inch spit job.

Thanks to Elke (my beautiful bride) and to Rich, for two of the photos linked above.

Posted by tornado at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)

September 18, 2006

Best Quotes from 22 Years of Storm Observing

During my two-decades-and-change of mobile storm observing, I've driven at least 99% of the miles, and in so doing, chased with some very expressive and imminently quotable people. Despite my rotten short-term memory, many of their best gems of insight imprinted their way into indelibility right away. There also have been a few great ones for which I've kicked myself over forgetting before I had a chance to write them down!

I've used the quotes below as ".sig" endings for storm related e-mail lists and board postings for many years, as they gradually piled up, but for the first time I've decided to offer them in bulk.

These quotes (in no particlar order) represent the gamut of storm observing moments, from funny to frustrating to frightening to joyous to confused, and most certainly, temporary dementia resulting in nonsensical gibberish. The names are omitted to protect the guilty, who know who they are! >:-)

"Give me 40 acres and I'll turn this Meatwagon around!"
- storm intercept partner, 1993

"Just the angular momentum has to @$#%& do it! Come on!!!"
- former NSSL crew partner, 1989

"Let's forget this tornado chasing and go look for Bigfoot."
- storm intercept partner, 2006

"I don't understand, meteorologically or common-sensically, what the deal is here."
- NSSL storm intercept partner, 1989

"Roger's been farting all the time."
- storm intercept partner, 2005

"We have a lot of generic hail for no apparent reason."
- storm intercept partner, 2003

"Hey Geraldo, is there a toilet over there? My pipes are backed up, man."
- Storm intercept partner, 2005 (on the phone with Geraldo Rivera)

"Give me the @$%#&* camera! You have no common sense at all!"
- NSSL storm intercept partner, 1989

"Something out of this is gonna do whatever's going to happen."
- storm intercept partner, 1998

"We're west of Hays. Hays is east of here."
- storm intercept partner, 2005

"Let's follow this sheriff. He'll get killed before we do."
- NSSL storm intercept partner, 1989

"I'm a f%$%@!* legend!"
- storm intercept partner, 1991

"A Meatwagon in motion tends to remain in motion."
- storm intercept partner, 1996

"A Meatwagon at rest tends to remain at rest."
- storm intercept partner, 1996

"Look at this, right overhead -- MOOOOOOOOOOOVE!"
- NSSL storm intercept partner, 1989

"Stop, for the sake of my sanity!"
- 2 different storm intercept partners, 1986 and 1991

"Into the mud, scum queen!"
- storm intercept partner talking to arcus cloud, 2004

"The atmosphere just grilled us up a sphincter burger."
- storm intercept partner, 1998

"At least I got my toenails cut today."
- storm intercept partner, 2005

"What IS the hell is that?"
- NSSL storm intercept partner, 1989

"If you stop, stop slowly; or I fly back into the windshield."
- NSSL storm intercept partner, 1989

"You don't understand what the deal is with these wires and my leg!"
- NSSL storm intercept partner, 1989

Posted by tornado at 10:24 PM | Comments (1)

August 30, 2006

23rd Severe Storms Conference in St. Louis

Information and Personal Thoughts on the Upcoming SLS Conference

The 23rd AMS Conference on Severe Local Storms is November 6-10 at the Adam's Mark in downtown St. Louis. I've uploaded the latest program in MS Excel format for your convenience, in addition to the menu driven version present on the AMS conference website. Note that this program may change, especially if papers are withdrawn or session chairs back out. I'll try to upload any changes ASAP to the same address.

For details on registering and attending, see the AMS meeting website. We'll be holding the oral sessions on the fourth floor (floor plan, the "Tiny URL" is http://tinyurl.com/n668x ), in the areas A and B combined as one big room. According to the AMS coordinator, posters will be in that "Pre-Convene" area on the first floor, with a view of the Gateway Arch.

---------

Some thoughts follow from "behind the scenes". The following views, as always in this BLOG, represent my own only and not those of the AMS or anyone else on the committee.

For a couple of years, since the last AMS Severe Local Storms Conference in Hyannis MA, I've co-chaired a committee to do the next one. Several of us asked folks in Hyannis, and others in the SLS community who couldn't make it, how it could be done better. We listened. Having to work within organizational rules and in a mindset of consensus kept those of us who are raging idealists (like me) from getting everything we wanted. But we came up with a lot of innovative ideas for invited speakers, seminars, panel discussions and such -- more two way interaction with the community and more in depth exposure to concepts in SLS science.

Unfortunately, all that, plus a large roster of speakers (particularly new speakers and students, who have been historically underrepresented), looked to be nearly impossible to jam into a one week conference, at least without some major and unquestionably detrimental concessions, and cutbacks to something good. It was either that, or run parallel sessions, the concept of which makes my skin crawl because it deprives attendees of the opportunity to fully participate and immerse themselves in cutting edge science throughout the week.

Along came the AMS annual meeting in Atlanta, and a chance for a presence there. Bingo! Ultmately we decided to (in effect) split this mega-conference in two --
1. Have the conventional SLS format in a later conference with no parallel sessions, and
2. The longer talks, invited speakers and panel-Ds in a Severe Storms Symposium, to be collocated with the AMS national meeting in Atlanta for maximum exposure to the broadest audience.

I wasn't able to make it to Atlanta for the Symposium, but I heard it was a success thanks in no small part to the brilliance and leadership of the co-chair, Paul Markowski, who did most of the work for the Symposium.

Though I've served as leader for the subsequent arrangement of the conventional SLS, it was, is, and will not be one man show. In order for one person to do this it would take far more time than I -- or any of the rest of us -- have had. Having a committee is a good thing, and I can't thank them enough for their help! Nobody has a monopoly on good ideas for a conference, and having a small group composed of representatives from research, SPC, NWS field forecasters and TV (as we did) maximizes the potential that something good will be "thought of" and brought to the table. Such a committee shouldn't be more than about 6 or 7 people, though; otherwise indvidual expertise gets diluted, and too many cooks are stirring the stew.

Unlike some past committees, we've had no resume-padding seat warmers or half-hearted participants. Everyone has been active and expressive in this deal. Everyone has participated, and often. This bunch hasn't been shy about expressing themselves to each other, candidly and straightforwardly. I like that! As long as all participants are willing to check egos at the door, it's the best, most honest way to communicate.

We picked a location and time based on a basic, common sense ideal: The SLS Conference shouldn't act as a posh paid vacation under the guise of a storm conference. This is about science and the exchange of ideas! Therefore...

Locate centrally, near a major airport, and in the fall, in order to
* Maximize geographic opportunities for student and NWS participation from universities and offices with severe storms expertise;
* Keep travel costs lower than at some far-flung mountain or coast resort, also to encourage the presence of student and NWS folks with limited travel funding;
* Have the conference out of severe storms season when many forecasters and research project participants might not be available;
* Minimize monopolistic, high-airfare travel burdens often found at smaller to mid-size airports.

We worked with AMS to research available venues in four cities that resulted from a larger list of possibilities that got whittled down by the four stars above: Memphis, Dallas-Ft, Worth, Kansas City and St. Louis. The venue was more important than the city, but having a multitude of dining and entertainment options in walking distance (for folks without cars) was important and did eliminate a few places. Next, were slots available at good venues at the right times? Were the venues too costly, prone to drive up the already high expense of the meeting for participants? In many cases, yes to either or both. Is there high-speed Internet? In the end, only one venue was standing as a best option: The St. Louis Adam's Mark. Fortunately it was hosting the NWA annual meeting, and we heard good things.

Timing was hard because of venue constraints, Federal fiscal year changeover, the move of OU, CIMMS, NSSL and SPC to new facilities in Norman, increasing cold and risk of nasty winter weather as the weeks go by, and other factors I can't recall right now. Could we accommodate every possibility? No. For example, the slot we got couldn't avoid a minor Federal holiday, so some NWS folks will have to travel on HOL leave, annual leave or a day off. I'm in that boat. Cest la vie. It's well worth it. I'd take AL if I had to (for the sake of the science) but fortunately I don't have to...just use HOL for Friday.

And so, after springime delays for severe weather season, we set about developing a series of traditional 15 minute oral slots and poster sessions based on the submissions received. Notably, not all submissions were accepted. A few more folks applied for orals than there was room, but not as many got "bumped" to poster as at some conferences. It actually helped that submission numbers were down, which also indicates more willingness on the part of those who do submit to make the effort do be there and to do it well. It remains to be seen how the conference will turn out, but I am optimistic this SLS conference will rock. If you can be there, and can afford AMS' registration fees, be there.

I'm especially excited for the young scientists -- the many first time presenters and students who will be there. I am hugely looking forward to seeing these twenty-and thirty-somethings start to take the batons of SLS science into the rest of this century. [OK, I'm still a thirty-something, but not for long...] Yes, these folks are the future of severe storms meteorology, and this is where it starts. I'm honored to play a part in their development as scientists and in what surely will be the eventual greatness of some of them. I truly believe those who are still around 40 years from now will look back at this roster of presenters and say that a few giants of the science got their first major exposure at this conference. That's cool. It motivates me every time I start to get tired of dealing with the hassles (and there are some, believe me). This is the future of meteorology, right here.

The hotel looks nice, it's close to lots of food and after-hours entertainment in downtown St. Louis, and the banquet (Wednesday night) looks to have some great food (for once...not the usual "AMS chicken"!) from high atop "Top of the Met." [I must thank Alan Shapiro, who volunteered early for setting that up.]

Did we think of everything, and is it going to be a perfect conference? No way. I would be delusional to promise anything, except for the opportunity to engage in some good science. And that's what it's all about. But you bet I will pass along ideas to the next conference chair. Don't be shy. During and after the conference, I want to be told what went wrong and how it can be done better. I want to be told what went right and should be kept. It's my willing duty to pass along whatever is needed to make future severe storms meetings even better, whether or not they are affiliated with AMS.

Future conference organizers, take note. Heed these words. It's not easy. Is it worth it? Ask me after the conference! But I bet I'll say that it was.

This was a lot of effort. Indeed -- especially if doing some of the stuff now arranged by AMS, such as venue contracts and setup logistics -- it could be a full-time job for two people for several months. Whether through AMS or not, future severe storms conferences must account for the business and bookkeeping end of things. It's a big part of the process and must not be taken lightly. Two people in the AMS (Cara Campbell and Judith Ziemnik) have been hugely helpful here, and Cara in particular has been the kind recipient of many abrupt requests, suggestions for betterment, idealistic rants, and nagging questions from yours truly.

Yes, the submission deadlines are firm and non-negotiable. We went a week later than we would have ordinarily, taking the stated deadline right up to the drop-dead date the AMS gave us. This gives everyone a level playing field, so that

1) Everybody has the extra week (what would have been the "grace period") to turn in papers and

2) People who turn in their work on time don't have to watch others procrastinate and flaunt deadlines.

Why is Sep. 15th the deadline? According to AMS, this is the drop-dead date by which to have papers ready to send to the CD printer. Why does it take so long to burn and print CDs before a conference? I don't know. Ask AMS brass. [I know I can cook and label a brick of 'em in far less time than a month and a half (more below).]

Many folks have complained about the costs of these conferences (me included). As committee chair I have no direct control over this but have managed to exert some influence and make requests for efficiencies that have kept costs from rising more than they already did. I wish I could claim to have done better in this regard.

There's a fine balance between trimming fluff and holding the meeting in a nice place, instead of a dank old roach motel with a big meeting room. The venue needs to (on its own merit) have incentives to encourage attendance...especially in middle America in November. This isn't a resort vacation, wasn't designed that way, and wasn't intended that way. It's about the science. But folks should have ample opportunities to unwind after the day's sessions.

Still the charges are high -- too high for some. For a more detailed discussion of the issue of high AMS meeting costs and the reasons behind them, see this essay by Doswell and Brooks, and this more detailed examination by Doswell.

There has been a good deal of discussion and debate, within in some quarters of the SLS community, over whether the SLS conference (or a different, new version) can be done better outside the oversight of the AMS. There is some precedent with the Cyclone Workshop (PDF). As scientists we ought to be open to the possibilities and not be blindly beholden to the monopoly, whether or not something comes of the idea.

In summary, advantages of an independent conference would include more direct accountability, streamlined cost-cutting passed on to the attendees, far lower "page charges" for CD supplies and burning (something I can do for a few hundred bucks total with a new multi-CD burner under warranty, and a few bricks of CDs), and preparation totally by scientists, for scientists.

Disadvantages mainly would revolve around a loss of AMS negotiating experience. Don't underestimate this. There would be a steeper learning curve regarding business acumen and contractual haggling on the part of folks who are scientists -- not businessmen -- in their day jobs. Overpriced as the AMS conferences can be, the folks who do this are putting in a lot of effort and deserve thanks for it (as above). Can it be done as well for far less? Probably. I'll stop with that food for thought.

Posted by tornado at 04:02 AM | Comments (2)

July 02, 2006

Our 2006 Storm Observing Season

The 2006 tornado season in the Great Plains was really lame most of the time -- the most supercell-starved and tornado-lacking season since 1988. Now make no mistake: I was here in '88, and this year wasn't worse than 1988 for visible tornadoes...not by a long shot, and not even in central OK. However, the day with photogenic tornadoes nearby (El Reno) I was on the next storm to the S (nontornadic), and had passed through El Reno twice already that afternoon. Ouch.

Aside from that, we scraped and clawed and pulled everything we could out of this season. I had to travel to SE KS, WY, SD and SW TX to see marginally tornadic storms, and good storm structure shots were even hard to come by. In this period of drought, we went long stretches characterized by no "chaseworthy" storms within hundreds of miles of Norman. Numerous chasers saw zero legitimate tornadoes this year.

Rich Gulf moisture simply never showed up, and supercells were either absent or moisture starved for most of the season. Still, there were lots of rainy, messy mesocyclones, thanks to problems with weak mid-upper level flow and cold outflow hosing things up on the storm scale.

I was very fortunate to have witnessed five short lived tornadoes -- four of which were rain wrapped to some degree and hard to see, two of which were not absolutely certain to us at the time. Given that I've had ten entirely tornado free years of the 21 since I've begun observing storms, this was not bad after all for me. In fact, we ended up having a great time with photography on a few chases. Elke and I also had some wonderful non-weather photographic experiences in places such as Devils Tower National Monument and Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge.

My favorite events probably were the sculpted, tornadic supercell of 5 May, near Patricia TX; and the brutally electrified, "Pac Man" supercell (barely tornadic) from 9 Jun, near Four Corners WY. Besides those links, I also will reproduce the Four Corners chase account below just for fun.

All our storm observing sojourns this year are documented in the Storms Observed This Year BLOG (see table at right for links).

==========================

VOLCANIC TOWER AND CONVECTIVE POWER

Northeastern WY, 9 Jun 6

SHORT: Abundant wildflower, Devils Tower and convective power photography. Intercepted tornado warned supercell between Sundance and Newcastle WY. Probable tornado observed, numerous daytime CGs photographed. Great dinner and sunset.

LONG: This was one of the finest Great Plains chase/photography days I've ever had, with or without a probable tornado in the western Black Hills of Wyoming.

The day began with a great breakfast cooked by the 81 year old female proprietor of Bob's Cafe (or "Bob Afe," depending on which side of the sign you view). We highly recommend this place in Belle Fourche -- a 1940s/1950s era diner where the locals have gathered for generations. One of these locals we befriended was a SD native just returned home from many years in Maine, a keen and highly talented outdoor photographer named Bob Clements. We ended up spending an hour or so with Bob, talking photography and getting the grand tour of his future gallery, in a musty old downtown brownstone that he is renovating himself. If you ever make it to Belle Fourche, and Bob's gallery is open, check it out.

Next came the drive to Devils Tower, which conveniently was on the way and very close to our forecast area of interest in SW SD and NE WY. We spent the midday hours photographing wildflowers and their surroundings, horses, sweeping landscape scenes across verdant valleys, and numerous scenes around the tower itself.

On the way to the tower, we noticed anvils streaming off convection unseen in the distant SW. Without live radar data, I still was (correctly) confident this was the result of high-based and rather moisture-starved storms around the Bighorns. An outflow-reinforced cold front had moved through, but not too cold to allow storms to form once the sun heated the air mass enough. The northeast and east winds behnd the front also would advect more moisture into the area with time. For the time being, though, I knew we had a little while to hang out near the tower and wait for better storms to form, closer by. So we did.

We found a great overlook a mile W of Devils Tower where only one other person came by in an hour, great for afternoon shots of the tower with not a single human artifact of any kind in view. Under the lazy drift of floating cumulus clouds, the tower's appearance never was the same from any given minute to the next, and we relished its many moods of light and shadow. I also shot time lapse video of the tower in the right foreground and distant cumulonimbi building in the background, over SD.

Those weren't our target storms, though, so we stayed put and experimented with other ways to view and photograph this amazing volcanic landmark. Patiently we waited for more storms that had formed over the Bighorns region to move our way and into better moisture. When the anvils moved overhead and the western skies grew dark with the looming bulk of robust, newer storms, it was time to go.

While driving about 10 W Sundance, we heard a SVR from RAP for what was then a tail-end cell over NW Weston County, moving E. Within a minute or two we found a high overlook from which we barely could see the updraft base about 25-30 miles SW, a dense core to its N, an inflow tail to its SE, and ragged attempts at a wall cloud.

We raced toward Sundance to get in intercept position, deciding to go SE of Sundance on the road to Newcastle, in order to stay ahead of the cell. It was evident the storm was a supercell, now right-moving E toward the unchaseable morass of the Black Hills. The roads were few, and the gamble was this:

1. Go SW of Sundance on WY-116 toward Upton and get closer to it faster (but spend much less time watching it) or

2. Head SE of town into higher terrain, temporarily losing view of it around Sundance and Inyan Kara Mountains, but getting in position to watch it longer from more of a distance...if we could find a good vantage looking SW.

We deiced to go with option 2, about the time a TOR warning blared through NWR. We were entangled with the town of Sundance at the time, unable to view the base due to buildings, trees and hills. For the next 16-18 minutes we couldn't see under the base S of Sundance either, thanks to rolling higher terrain W of the road.

I was wondering if my eastern decision would hose us out of a chance to see a tornado, while driving mile afer mile with the SW sky obstructed. This was very frustrating, but the annoyance proved to be blissfully ephemeral. Motoring S on the spaghetti road, through the rolling western foothills of the Black Hills, we finally found a good westward viewing spot 5 NW of "Four Corners."

The supercell had something of a wet, outflow-dominant appearance when we first took position. Soon it sported a very low wall cloud 10-15 miles to our WSW (wide angle view), which intermittently wrapped in rain, then re-emerged. To its ESE (our SW-SSW) a heavy and elongated rear-flank core appeared, along with other, newer updraft bases. This gave the whole process the look of a supercell evolving into either a deep LEWP notch or an HP "Pac Man" type storm, with the mesocyclone in the inner corner of Pac Man's mouth.

At times it looked like a "meso on the ground," though it was hard to see true ground thanks to a gentle rise about 7-8 miles to our W. One thick pile of tail cloud material appeared to form near the ground and race southward into the wall cloud. Meanwhile, all sorts of wild looking bands and patches of cloud material overhead and into the storm, along with the green landscape of grassland and broken short pine, and an astounding barrage of strobe-style lightning bolts, made for wonderful wide-angle landscape photography.

A small core formed SSE of the meso and grew bigger, merging with the rear-flank (wrap-around hook) core until the meso itself became a deeply occluding notch. The strengthening inflow felt cold and was -- 65-67 deg F, but it was from the E, and our elevation was 5700 feet. Normalize those temps at lower elevations, or put them in at our elevation on a sounding diagram, and the thermal characteristics actually look pretty nice for supercell inflow.

The lightning with this storm was impressive, even for this 21-year storm intercept veteran. Dozens of CGs popped over the valley and ridges between us and the meso, but at a safe distance. Between Elke and me, we captured 20 or more in our hand-held photos, thanks to the ridiculous repetitiveness of the flashes. Several times we each shot the same lightning strike using only a finger reaction to the first flash. But that's not all. Get this: I was able to take two separate, all-manual photos of one CG (the first one linked above)! I've never done this before, nor heard of it being done. That's how long the strobing lasted with some of them. At times, it was like a giant atmospheric discotheque over there.

What is it about the electrical layout and resistance characteristics of supercell storms that causes some to produce strobing lightning strokes one after another, each lasting 2-3 seconds, while others simply hurl super-quick staccato bolts hither and yon?

Meanwhile, the meso tightened up dramatically and shed some precip from its E side, forming another very low wall cloud, scud rising fast up the N side. The horizontal and differential cloud tag motions got rapid as well, more so than several tornadic storms I've seen; and I was beginning to wonder if this one could spin something up before it got rain-wrapped. Thick precip already surrounded the meso in every direction except NE-E, but fortunately, we were tucked in the "notch" ENE of it.

Cloud base rotation under the wall cloud also became obvious, and at times, quite intense, as seen through zoom lenses due to the distance. At 5:07 pm MDT (6:07 pm CDT) one very suspicious lowering -- tapered, fuzzy and rapidly evolving -- developed under the wall cloud and appeared to reach ground, though the terrain precluded irrefutable confirmation.

I ran to the car to get binoculars, which revealed this feature as a furiously rotating funnel, at times extending below the level of the low ridge in the distance. I managed to snap a few photos in between careful eyeball coverage, the best being one which also captured one of those strobing CGs by chance (here's a super-enhanced version).

Was it a tornado? I'm quite confident despite the limitations of terrain and distance. Probabilistically speaking, I'll say at least 90%. It's hard to conceive otherwise given the persistence of the funnel, as well as cloud motions both internal and ambient to the feature.

By 5:10 p.m. MDT, a thick bear's cage wrapped around the wall cloud from the S, leaving it a mystery what was going on behind the orbiting rain curtains. Something suspicious might still be apparent in this shot at 5:11 p.m. (super-enhanced contrast version), but after that, the whole mesocyclonic circulation got too deeply buried in rain to infer much.

We reeled off a few more CG-over-landscape shots, and the electrical action and cores started getting close (wide angle). The last CG that I dared to shoot instantly ignited an orange fireball on the next hillside. I didn't want to be next, so in the car we went.

Forward motion of the storms began to accelerate, and it appeared an MCS was spontaneously developing all around us. With the only east option extending into the depths of the Black Hills, and the sky erupting into MCS ALQDS, we decided to call off the chase and head SSW to Newcastle for dinner and lodging. [Also recommended -- the Fountain Inn with free wi-fi, and collocated LaCosta Mexican Restaurant, with excellent steak-and-shrimp fajitas!]

After a great dinner we did some photography along WY 16, NW of town. This included a high-based, elevated storm in the golden light, near an old missile silo. As it moved toward its SE and to our S, a rainbow and some postcrepusculars became visible.

Clouds to the WNW blocked a lot of the best sunset light, but we enjoyed it immensely anyway. What couldn't be photographed was the earthy-spicy smell of rain-washed sage, an aroma of life's renewal rising from an arid land newly drenched, the joyful warble of hundreds of meadowlarks resonating across the Thunder Basin grasslands, the cool moist breezes carrying these scents and sounds to us and through us.

Back at the hotel I couldn't resist taking couple of twilight and nighttime shots of their tornado shaped fountain, bathed in spotlights of alternating colors.

We had a long and amazing day, and slept very well that night... almost too well!

===== Roger =====

Posted by tornado at 09:36 AM | Comments (3)

May 31, 2006

Shrill Paranoids Attack Devoted Scientists

Some previously unknown bunch of pseudoscientific nobodies recently banded together to assign themselves the deceptive, official sounding moniker, "U.S. Climate Emergency Council." This really is an ad-hoc, ragamuffin band of knee-jerk extremists who apparently believe that scientific debate should have only one side: that with which they happen to agree.

This newfound group decided to crawl out of the woodwork and launch a protest in Washington today to call for the resignation of, among others, National Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield, accusing him and others in NOAA of "covering up" the supposed connection between "global warming" and Hurricane Katrina.

Ridiculous!

Whatever someone would like to claim from the administration level to NOAA, Max and the other dedicated scientists with whom he works at NHC are not, I repeat not, involved in any cover-up. Period.

What rotting log of abject cluelessness did these people crawl from beneath? This is classical, knee-jerk paranoia drawn straight from the shrill stylebooks of numerous other blame-gamers who don't have the scientific understanding or the cerebral capacity for independent thought, and instead take this hackneyed old path: If you don't like what you hear, it must be a government conspiracy.

"Hear ye, hear ye, rid thyselves of thy minds, joineth our mob mentality, climbeth aboard the Bandwagon of Blame!"

Similarly paranoid extremists like the Aryan Nation, or any of dozens of UFO groups, have employed these tactics for generations; now it appears the "global warming" branch of the green brigade has their version of Ruby Ridge nut jobs as well. And it's sad too, because there are good scientific arguments being made in the meteorological community for an influence of "global warming" on tropical weather, that are being besmirched by this activity. Not that they would care, but for USCEC's information, there are also equally legitimate and well supported arguments that there is not enough evidence yet to make conclusions about any such links.

What should happen? The scientific debate should continue with evidence presented and arguments made, for however long it must take until the question of hurricane activity and "global warming" is more firmly settled. In real science, unlike in pop-culture, such things often take years, perhaps decades.

Science does not -- and for its integrity, must not -- work on artificial timescales forced by politicians, unscientific protesters, or the popular news media that caters to ten-second attention spans. Science is not something that provides firm, irrefutable answers instantly to those who demand such answers yesterday, and blame the ever-popular bogeyman of "government cover-up" when the answers don't come as they like to hear.

Unfortunately the shrill, whacked-out dogma spewing from these extremists tends to drown out the sensible middle. That sensible middle is the legitimate scientific debate about the role, if any, of global mean tropospheric thermal trends in the activity of tropical cyclones. Both sides in the debate recently have published well-written and well-supported essays in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

This debate was represented very professionally and cordially in these essays, which I encourage authentically science minded folks with an interest in this issue to peruse:

Pielke, R.A. Jr., C. Landsea, M. Mayfield, J. Laver and R. Pasch, 2005: Hurricanes and global warming. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 86, 1571-1575.

Anthes, R.A., R.W. Corell, G. Holland, J.W. Hurrell, M.C. McCracken, and K. E. Trenberth, 2006: Hurricanes and global Warming -- potential linkages and consequences. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 87, 623-628.

Pielke, R.A. Jr., C. Landsea, M. Mayfield, J. Laver and R. Pasch, 2006: Reply to "Hurricanes and global warming -- potential linkages and consequences. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 87, 628-631.

Note that there are rock-solid scientists like Max, his center's science officer (Chris Landsea), Rick Anthes, Roger Pielke, Greg Holland and others above, engaged on both sides in this critically important and needed dialogue. This dialogue does not need to be polluted by politics, money, or the immature whining of unscientific fringe groups carrying emotionally evocative placards.

Tastelessly displayed signs depicting fetid waters and floating corpses do inflame emotion. However, ignorant protesting will not resolve this issue. Science will. Give science the breathing room and the time to do so.

Now, as for the aforementioned fringe group, and their absolutely baseless attacks on Max and his integrity... I shall set science aside for the moment and discuss where it gets personal.

I've known Max Mayfield for over 16 years and can assure anyone and everyone that his scientific ethic is without reproach. He also is as fine of a person as exists in government service. To quote from an essay I wrote a little over a year ago:

Max is as humble, pleasant, and honest as can be. How he is on the air is how he is, period -- truthful, caring and positive, but also quite serious when necessary (i.e., when lives at stake from a landfalling hurricane). Being a high profile manager hasn't corrupted him one bit, which is a rare treat to see in meteorology.

Yes, Max is an excellent manager -- the best thing that could have happened to NHC these past few years in my opinion. He has earned every award and accolade he has received, and in fact, he deserves far more. Those who know me also know that I do not dole out such praise lightly, or often, when it comes to members of management. Max is a rare exception. I will stand firmly in his defense against any and all attack -- not that he needs it, given his honesty and integrity. But I cannot stand idly while irrational people with no idea of how science works try to ruin his career and those of the other meteorologists who don't happen to subscribe blindly to the eco-radical dogma that has been spoon-fed to these protesters.

Clueless, publicity-hungry blowhards need to leave the science debate to the scientists, and exit stage right before they make even worse fools of themselves.

All too often, the sad truth is that politicians tend to listen to those who make the most noise, not those who have the most knowledge. And of course, being government employees, Max and Chris in particular are forbidden from lobbying for their own sake in the media and Congressional arenas. They have to sit there quietly and take potshots from some publicity-hungry gang of pathological blamers.

As a fellow scientist, but also a union steward in a science shop, I'm not so bound to be quiet. Therefore, I won't...I legally can and will make public statements about these issues, and stand up for the science and the scientists involved. As for those besmirching Max and Chris: I will not tolerate any attack on their jobs, their expertise or their credibility.

Posted by tornado at 03:25 PM | Comments (1)

March 29, 2006

Online Tornado FAQ still online!

The Online Tornado FAQ now is online only at http://www.stormeyes.org/tornado/faq . Please update your bookmarks accordingly.

The Online Tornado FAQ is not present right now on the SPC web server because of a new regulation prohibiting the use of anything but fully public domain imagery on an NWS website -- even if the photographers have granted written permission for its copyright-restricted use.

The FAQ uses a lot of user-contributed personal photography which folks have been generous enough to allow over the years, in order to best illustrate concepts. The amount of time and effort that it would take to seek total public domain release of some imagery, remove the rest, rewrite content, re-code links, hunt for and format purely public domain imagery of at least equal quality and relevance to the concepts (if it exists) -- all for what would be a smaller and less informative site in the end -- is prohibitive, especially during severe storm season.

A reduced version may return to the original website eventually, but this will be the fullest and most up to date Tornado FAQ from here onward. Also, a major modernized redesign is being considered at the new address to make the FAQ even more user friendly and attractive.

The Stormeyes version has been the mirror site for the "government" version at http//www.spc.noaa.gov/faq/tornado . The mirror -- now the full time site -- exists on a nonprofit weather site (stormeyes.org). The Online Tornado FAQ remains purely for educational and informative purposes, as it has been since I started it the FAQ in 1997.

All content on the Tornado FAQ was created in the public domain and remains so -- except for copyrighted photos. People wishing to use such imagery must get permission from the person named on the photo. The Online Tornado FAQ is being provided in full and without further interruption -- as a free educational service to anyone and everyone.

If you have any questions, e-mail me offline (TORNADO at STORMEYES dot ORG).

Posted by tornado at 06:48 AM | Comments (1)

March 25, 2006

A Bat-eating Supercell and Other Mexican Storm Imports

While working a South Texas severe weather event a few days ago, I took note of the expanding rings on several 0.5 degree reflectivity cuts from Del Rio and New Braunfels. These are pretty common in those parts, actually -- swarms of bats leaving their caves for their nocturnal bug feast.

There was just one little problem: part of one of the swarms was about to get munched by an intensifying supercell that had formed in the Serranias del Burro range of Mexico, then moved across the Rio Grande in a collision course with the bats. It clearly was going to be a bad night (and probably a deadly one) for some of those bats!

The web page is featured here (until the next Cool Image update, where it will get a link from the bottom).

It has been a long time since I've had the time and opportunity to add anything new to the Cool Image page at work. Sometimes I notice interesting phenomena, but the shifts are too busy to gather images. Sometimes long stretches will pass by before I see (or someone else points out) something that would be great for that page. Often I see suggestions after the imagery already has been purged from the systems (usually within about two days, because of space limitations on the storage discs). Fortunately I was on duty for this peculiar event, and had just enough time in between map analyses, mesoscale discussions and other work to grab the imagery.

As luck would have it, I'm also gathering environmental data for cases of supercells that form in the Serranias del Burro for a small research project -- mainly to document their environments, modes of development and motion, and the regimes that tend to bring such storms into the U.S. This is a concern for parts of South Texas because these storms often form well removed from others, in a very desolate part of another nation containing no storm spotters or chasers. "Del Burro" storms that have crossed the international border have been known to produce huge hail, flo