On a Saturday even. This is why, it is even worse than the one yesterday:
Here’s the Press Release:
Contact: Keli Pirtle, NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
405-325-6933 (office) / 405-203-4839 (cell) April 13, 2012
Chris Vaccaro, NOAA’s National Weather Service
202-536-8911
Media Advisory: NOAA’s National Weather Service to discuss central U.S. severe weather
Tornadoes and large hail will be among the severe weather threats in the central and southern Plains on Saturday. Experts with NOAA’s National Weather Service will provide a briefing to explain what’s expected and what’s causing the latest round of potentially destructive weather.
What: Media briefing on severe weather expected in the central U.S
When: Saturday, April 14; 1 p.m. CT / 2 p.m. ET
Who: Bill Bunting, chief of operations, NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center
Experts also available:
Tom Bradshaw, meteorologist, National Weather Service – Southern Region
Mike Hudson, meteorologist, National Weather Service – Central Region
[media passcode redacted for this blog post]
Severe weather online resources:
Latest severe weather watches and outlooks from NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla.: http://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/
Latest warnings and forecasts issued by local National Weather Service forecast offices: www.weather.gov
Preparedness tips from FEMA’s Ready.gov:
http://www.ready.gov/natural-disasters
# # #
Mike Smith of Wichita based WeatherData writes:
Yes, this is a big deal. I’ll be chasing today. You can follow at @usweatherexpert. (Twitter)
Right now, it quite, too quite…I expect quite a show this evening when the dry line pushes in about 2AM CDT. Hope my roof stays on….
Statistically speaking, everything is always “normal” about the weather if you take a long enough period of time and a wide enough area of observation. On the scale of hundreds of thousands of years, everything that happens to the weather these days (including the ubiquitous “climate change”) is trivial.
Locally and on the time-scale of one or two generations, however, cyclical changes of weather are distinct.
When we moved to South Colorado 21 years ago, winters here were cold and snowy. Our little town of Pagosa Springs even boasted a board on the side of the road, declaring it to be the place of “The most snow in Colorado.”
As years passed, the weather was becoming warmer and drier in our end of the woods. UV radiation also intensified. The peak of this “local climate change” was in the end of 1990s, especially in 1997-1998. Local government quietly removed the snow-boasting sign.
Since then, droughts abated, and winters were becoming gradually wetter and colder.
The last winter (2011-2012) was the first one in 20 years when the old pattern of 1970s returned; snow cover did not disappear for 5 months. And I am pretty sure it is going to be colder in the years to come, since climatology spongers cannot place a control in the heart of the Sun.
Tornado warning = Harper county. Still headed my way!
Headed to the basement. Got a “monster wedge” 1/2 mile big one coming. see ya.
[Moderator’s Reply: Good Luck. -REP]
Big update from CNN. It looks like a hospital got hit in Iowa. Not good at all. Best wishes to all in the path.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/14/us/midwest-storms/?hpt=hp_t3
Like they way they count the “number” of tornadoes. Apparently the “same” tornado on a directional track is counted when down then not when up and then again when down. Interesting way to get the numbers up. Using this methodology we have now had 80 tornadoes in OK and 70 in Kansas (10:15 PM).
What they do is the real time count is the total of all reports received then as it gets sorted out the next day as the ground teams report back in is weed out the extras, connect the tracks that stayed on the ground and renumber the total it may take weeks in an two or three day long out break to get the data filtered and finalized.
They went to this method because the insurance claims are tied to the initial report for validation, so now all reports go onto the record and the final filtered data goes into the records, but the original reports are still available to the public for insurance purposes. In the past they had problems with long delays and multiple return phone calls from both claimants and ins carriers, so this is how they fixed the problem.
@ur momisugly Richard Holle:
Ah. Adjusting the data. Haven’t we been there before? Often?
@ur momisugly Richard Holle:
A little confused about insurance and the need to “confirm” tornado damage. Isn’t damage still damage regardless of wind, hail other. And why would this cause “delays”?
You can see the class of the wind directions here…
http://hint.fm/wind/index.html
@ur momisugly Richard Holle: Aha. That explains the crazy business about “alleged tornados” and “suspected tornados” that has infested the news media in the last few years. I wondered if tornados had acquired defense attorneys, or some kind of National Association for the Advancement of Cyclonic Persons.
So it is a lawyer thing after all, but not quite the way I imagined!
Donald L. Klipstein says:
April 14, 2012 at 5:28 pm “Greenish Tint”
As an Okie, I’ve always understood that green skies preceded hail.
Missed my house by about 4 miles to the south. Fell asleep downstairs and just got up. Going to tour the damage shortly. The paper states only minor injuries with a potential heart attack. Wichita got lucky by this much.
Okie says:
April 14, 2012 at 8:25 pm
Like they way they count the “number” of tornadoes. Apparently the “same” tornado on a directional track is counted when down then not when up and then again when down. Interesting way to get the numbers up. Using this methodology we have now had 80 tornadoes in OK and 70 in Kansas (10:15 PM).
That’s probably because they are different tornadoes. It’s common for the mesocyclone that generated the tornado to become occluded as the parent storm cycles. The inflow to the meso gets cut off, the tornado ropes out, and a new meso forms, spawning a new tornado. You can see it in the damage track maps, where the tornado track looks like a dashed line. There’s no conspiracy here to somehow pad the numbers…when the damage track stops, the tornado is done.
I’m happy to say that our house fell into one of the gaps in the dotted line last night. We had reports of a larger multi-vortex heading our way, but it fell apart about a mile south of our place. It reformed about 10 miles to our NE and went through southern- and southeast-Wichita. I’ll find out tomorrow if I have a place to go to work.
Talk about irony. I spent the day chasing storms, only to return home and hide in the basement.
re post by: RobRoy says: April 14, 2012 at 11:22 am
I’m fairly sure that most homes in Alabama don’t have cellars or basements. Helps to know these sorts of things before using them as justification for various assumptions.
re post by: RobRoy says: April 14, 2012 at 11:22 am
I’m fairly sure that the majority of homes in Alabama don’t have cellars or basements. Helps to know these sorts of things before making such assumptions. I’d bet the majority of homes in Florida don’t have them either.
re post by: RobRoy says: April 14, 2012 at 11:22 am
I’m fairly sure that the majority of homes in Alabama don’t have cellars or basements. Helps to know these sorts of things before making such assumptions. I’d bet the majority of homes in Florida don’t have them either.
Gotta say also, I REALLY despise this logging in crap from wordpress. Lately I not only enter a comment only to have it go to the ‘login required’ page causing me to lose my comment, but then AFTER I log in, and try to post, frequently it takes me to the login page AGAIN, even tho I am already logged in. I’m also now getting the thing a few others have reported where the comment area size goes to about two lines, with no way to scroll or move down to double check what I’ve written.
Frankly, Anthony and mods, it may be time to start looking at other blog site options to move WUWT to and get off of wordpress. I’m commenting a lot less because of this crap, and I’d bet that’s true of a lot of others also. WordPress is eliminating much of what made them popular before, and becoming a real pain in the rear.
[Reply: WordPress has become a real problem lately. You can expand the comment box by hitting Enter, or by putting the cursor into the few lines you can see, then using the up/down arrows to open the comment box. ~dbs, mod.]
Just great /sarc
Apologies for the essentially duplicate posts – thank the
miraculous and oh-so-useful (/sarc)buggy, irritating, time-wasting, and sometimes comment eating wordpress login process.re: Moderator Reply
THANK YOU for the reply and suggestions. I’d already tried using cursor in the few lines visible then using arrow keys, and that didn’t work at all (firefox 9 & windows 7). Will try hitting enter to see if that works. YEP, that worked! just have to back out the added return from it, but at least then the comment box is re-expanded so I can see and edit the post.
Thanks again!
No tornadoes in Alabama, Hah, I’ve seen 3 tornadoes there, actually at the same time (those 3 were all “un-official”), the 4th was one I didn’t see, it was the F3 the roared through Marshal Space Flight Center, Redstone Arsenal and Huntsville on April 3, 1974, well i did see it on the TV weather radar giving about three steps warning. If it hadn’t taken a lucky skip going over Monte Sano, I likely would have been seriously injured or killed.
@ur momisugly Rational Db8:
I quit trying to work with the comment box, too much to remember and too cranky. I type it all up in Windows WordPad, then copy and paste. Easy and I don’t lose it, plus I have an automatic copy if I want it.
@ur momisugly JimBob:
“The inflow to the meso gets cut off, the tornado ropes out, and a new meso forms, spawning a new tornado. You can see it in the damage track maps, where the tornado track looks like a dashed line.”
Still, if it’s the same storm cell on the same straight track and the tornado just hops and skips, then to me it’s just a technicality that it’s a “new” tornado because that’s what a lot of tornadoes do. One of the cells in Oklahoma had around 40 dashes in it on the same straight track. I can see that if the tornado completely dies in the same cell, moves on, then reforms from the same cell and track, I could (kinda) see that as being a new tornado provided it didn’t overlay the old one.
Since the rules are never explained, I’m sure that the common belief is that when hearing that there are “100 tornadoes” that the things are flying around all over the place and not on just one or a few tracks from one or a few cells.
Regarding the 6 fatalities in Woodward due to middle-of-the-night tornadoes over the weekend — as I understand it, the first set of tornadoes happened while most of the residents were still awake. After the tornadoes went through (damaging siren transmitters while they passed), the next set of tornadoes came through after midnight. Many people did not hear the sirens the second time and were no longer watching the radar. One commentator said that the sirens are meant to notify people who are outdoors. If you are not outdoors, he said, you need to keep up with conditions using 2-3 methods (e.g., radio, TV, computer).
I believe another complication with that area is the difficulty in maintaining cell phone contact. Many of the storm chasers were unable to report in because of that.
I happened to spend a day in that part of the state last month, and while there, I was unable to maintain my cell phone’s charge, as well as contact with the system (my carrier is not AT&T). The lack of carrier did not surprise me, but the failure of my battery that day did surprise me. I had fully charged it overnight before leaving on my trip. It normally maintains its charge for 2-3 days. After I got back home, I had no further problems with my cell phone’s battery. FWIW, I wondered if the Ames magnetic anomaly in Major County had anything to do with it.