the_other_sandy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
the_other_sandy) wrote2011-05-01 04:25 pm
the_other_sandy) wrote2011-05-01 04:25 pm
Entry tags:
2011 Severe Storms Seminar
Time for my annual tl;dr post about bad weather.
I've been going to this seminar (hosted and organized by WGN meteorologist Tom Skilling at Fermilab in Batavia, IL) since the mid-nineties and I have never seen it so crowded. What usually happens is that those of us who want to be sure to get a seat in the auditorium show up between 10:00 and 10:30 a.m., the auditorium opens at 11:00, it fills up around 11:30 or 11:40, and they close the doors and start funneling people toward alternate viewing areas to watch the presentations on CCTV. This year, the foyer filled up by 10:30 and they had to open the auditorium 20 minutes early for safety reasons. The auditorium was full and the doors had closed by 11:15.
I have also never seen so many first-timers there. Usually when they ask for a show of hands, maybe 40% of the audience is new. This time it was closer to 80%. You would think that was a good thing, but I'm not really sure why many of them were there. Maybe they thought it was going to be four hours of non-stop tornado videos? Several of them brought young children, but this seminar is more like a college lecture with lots of graphs and charts and technical terms, and only the occasional cool video. The poor kids were bored silly, and people (even the ones without kids) started leaving in noticeable chunks after each speaker. Many of the people around me left, which was kind of nice in that I didn't have to hold my stuff on my lap anymore and it got a lot cooler without any people to be crammed like sardines next to. Still, now that the seminar is being streamed live, I think I may try that instead of going back.
Now excuse me while I get my weather geek on.
Tom Skilling -- Opening Remarks
Tom Skilling opened up by summarizing some of the historic weather events of the last year, including the tornado outbreak earlier this week. The 288 tornadoes that ripped through the South a few days ago shattered the record of 148 tornadoes previously held by the super outbreak in the Ohio River Valley in 1974.
There was also some footage of the tornado hitting Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. A passenger in a waiting area in Concourse C was shooting video of the lightning outside when you could suddenly hear a roaring sound and the windows started to bow out. Everyone ran, and the next image was of the broken windows and the rain pouring into the waiting area.
Skilling also showed a clip of himself on a storm chase with speaker Jim Reed in May 2010 where they wound up being chased down a road by a multiple vortex tornado. When they made it to a major highway, there were semis blown onto their sides all up and down the road.
Louis Uccellini -- Forecasting the Blizzards of 2010-2011
The director of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Prediction talked about modern forecast modeling and how it applied to last winter's blizzards in New York City and Chicago. Today's forecast models look at global weather patterns via satellite because conditions developing in the Pacific Ocean can lead to weather events in the Midwest or on the East Coast. Current forecast modeling computers are capable of performing 73.1 trillion calculations per second.
Unfortunately, modeling the weather isn't enough. There are human factors involved too that NOAA hasn't learned to successfully deal with yet. Even though the blizzard warning went out for New York City 14 hours in advance of the storm, the city didn't fully prepare for it because the storm arrived on Christmas Day, and who wants to pay double overtime to prepare for a storm that might not come, or might not be as severe as predicted? In Chicago, we were warned 24 hours in advance that the blizzard would arrive at 3:00 p.m., but my employer still chose not to close until 4:30, even though the blizzard actually arrived around a quarter to 3:00. And no one could have predicted that a bus accident would completely block Lake Shore Drive while 70 mph winds and snow falling at an inch an hour for 20 hours would prevent emergency services from clearing up the accident, stranding some people in their cars for as long as 14 hours.
Uccellini took questions at the end, and this is where I really started wondering why some of the new people were here. They certainly didn't seem to have any previous interest in the weather. The kids who had been paying attention asked some really good questions about whether El Niños and La Niñas had a predictable cycle and whether or not they were getting stronger, resulting in more violent weather outbreaks. The middle-aged adult behind me who was waving his hand around and yelling "Ooh! Ooh!" like Horshack wanted to know if we could get an EF5 tornado here and if the damage would be as bad as in the South. Well, (a) an EF5 tornado can happen anywhere, especially in the United States, even though they are statistically more likely to occur in some places more than others, and (b) the tornado classification scale is based on observed wind damage, so the damage caused by an EF5 tornado is going to be the same in Alabama as it is in Chicago as it is in Idaho. The adult in front of me wanted to know why there was so much bad weather in the middle of the country. Because he was apparently absent the day his elementary school science class covered what happens when warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico meets cool, dry air from the Rocky Mountains. Seriously, we have picture books at the library that explain this. I was not surprised when either of them left early.
Jim Angel -- February 2011 Blizzard's Impact
Poor Tom Skilling. There were three speakers in a row named Jim, and he introduced the wrong one. This Jim is a state climatologist with the Midwest Regional Climate Center who came to talk about the blizzard we had here last February, which I mostly knew about because I was there (see posts here, here, here, and here).
He did confirm something I'd noticed myself in that it's not until we get six inches of snow at once that things start going to hell in a handcart in terms of nightmarish travel times, school closures, and keeping up with snow removal. He also said that at one point during the blizzard nearly 7000 miles of Illinois highways were under a foot or more of snow all at the same time.
Jim Reed -- Storm Chaser: A Photographer's Journey
This is the one speaker all the people who had left early probably would have enjoyed seeing. Reed is a professional weather photographer/videographer who mostly came to pimp his book of weather photographs (which is available on Amazon and bears the same title as his talk).
Reed was also the storm chaser in the car with Tom Skilling that I mentioned before, being chased down a road by a multiple vortex tornado. Reed said he was amused that he'd sounded so calm on the video when the only thing going through his mind at the time was "Oh my God, I just killed Tom Skilling!"
This was also the only panel with a lot of photos and footage of storms, ranging from tornadoes to hurricanes to ice storms. One piece of footage showed why you can't afford to have tunnel vision while storm chasing. He was shooting photos of a tornado while his assistant was shooting video. Then she panned up and caught a second funnel forming directly over their heads. Fortunately, it never touched down. He also had footage of deer sprinting across a field trying to outrun a tornado and of his own chase vehicle being caught in a storm surge during a hurricane.
He made an off-hand comment about it being his former chase vehicle and someone asked what happened to it. Well, it survived the storm surge, hail, tornadoes, and over 300,000 miles of driving, only to be totaled by a 16-year-old with a brand new drivers license during a snowstorm in Colorado. He also mentioned, but didn't go into, how he had to stop filming hurricane landfalls after suffering PTSD-like symptoms after experiencing too many of them, and their aftermaths, in too short a time.
He was a really funny and entertaining speaker though, so I hope they have him back.
Jim Allsopp -- Tornadoes in the Chicago Area
Allsopp is the warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Chicago. His talk about tornadoes in the area was mostly filled with charts and graphs that I can't reproduce here, but he did have an interesting audio recording from the Oak Lawn tornado in 1967. The manager of the Coral Theater was taking a speech class and he brought a tape recorder outside the theater to record the reactions of passersby to the bad thunderstorm they were having that day. He wound up narrating the tornado as it roared through town, including the part where a car fell out of the sky and landed in the middle of 95th Street.
After a short intermission, there was a nine minute video of the tsunami in Japan pouring into one of the coastal harbors. Skilling chose to show it because it was a textbook example of how tsunamis behave, and he narrated it and pointed out the features to us as the video played.
Dr. Mary Ann Cooper -- Lightning Injury: What's Going On in the Other Countries
Dr. Cooper has been giving talks on lightning safety at this seminar for years. After decades of work in preventing lightning injuries in the U.S., she feels like her job here is mostly done; there were only 29 deaths caused by lightning last year. Now her focus is on preventing lightning injuries and deaths other countries, which has its own unique challenges.
The biggest problems are in developing nations. Some of the most frequent lightning activity in the world occurs in central Africa and northern India, where people tend to live on open plains in mud and thatch houses with no plumbing. In the U.S., the plumbing in the walls creates a Faraday cage effect that directs the lightning strike through the walls of the home instead of blasting straight through to the ground. In Africa and India, the strikes not only plow straight through, they also ignite the thatch roofs, which can then collapse on the occupants and burn them to death. These countries also don't have the forecasting resources available in more developed countries, and even if they did, there's no way to get the word to the remote villages in time, since many of them don't have electricity, let alone TVs or radios.
There are also cultural challenges that are proving to be an obstacle. In remoter parts of South Africa, people believe that a lightning strike victim was targeted by another villager who called down the strike as a curse, so revenge killings after people are struck by lightning are not uncommon. In Peru, lightning strike victims are often shunned because the people believe the victim has fallen out of favor with the gods. A person left alone in the Peruvian Andes in the winter, especially one suffering from the aftereffects of a lightning injury, doesn't have very good odds of survival.
Also, governments won't allocate resources for lightning injury prevention without statistics to prove it's worthwhile, but gathering the data is incredibly problematic due to the remoteness of some villages and the lack of reporting. The rural poor also tend to have more immediate problems (like feeding themselves and their families) than lightning.
With local culture being such a major factor, Dr. Cooper is focusing on putting interested parties in touch with each other to form their own working groups and come up with solutions that make sense for them and their countries.
Brian Smith -- Killer Winds: Do Not Ignore Thunderstorm Warnings
Smith is the warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service Office in Omaha, Nebraska, and if there's one thing he wanted everyone to take away from the seminar, it was DO NOT IGNORE SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNINGS. Most people blow them off because, hey, it's not like it's a tornado or anything. Yet wind is dangerous, even when it's not rotating. Straight line winds associated with severe thunderstorms can do as much damage as an EF2 tornado. Winds associated with some of these storms can exceed 100 mph. Most of the deaths associated from these winds are from falling trees that were blown over during the storm, but there is also a risk of sustaining a fatal head injury from hail.
Ed Fenelon -- Rip Currents: Killers on the Great Lakes
Fenelon is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Weather Forecast Office in Chicago. Most people associate rip currents (aka undertows or riptides) with ocean beaches, but the Great Lakes are enough of an inland sea to generate waves high enough to result in rip currents. In fact, there were 30 deaths on the Lakes from rip currents in 2010.
The problem is that rip currents occur where wave heights are the lowest, so those areas look most attractive to swimmers who don't realize what they're looking at. Rip currents are too strong for any human to swim against, but they're also very narrow. The best way to escape from one is to swim parallel to shore until you're free of it, then swim back to shore at an angle to avoid winding up back in it.
He also had many pictures of rip currents, which are surprisingly easy to spot once you know what to look for. Of course, it's also easier to spot them from the air than it is from the ground.
I really enjoyed the seminar this year. There have been some popular repeat talks, but this was the first time in many, many years that all of the talks were new, even if the speakers weren't.
I've been going to this seminar (hosted and organized by WGN meteorologist Tom Skilling at Fermilab in Batavia, IL) since the mid-nineties and I have never seen it so crowded. What usually happens is that those of us who want to be sure to get a seat in the auditorium show up between 10:00 and 10:30 a.m., the auditorium opens at 11:00, it fills up around 11:30 or 11:40, and they close the doors and start funneling people toward alternate viewing areas to watch the presentations on CCTV. This year, the foyer filled up by 10:30 and they had to open the auditorium 20 minutes early for safety reasons. The auditorium was full and the doors had closed by 11:15.
I have also never seen so many first-timers there. Usually when they ask for a show of hands, maybe 40% of the audience is new. This time it was closer to 80%. You would think that was a good thing, but I'm not really sure why many of them were there. Maybe they thought it was going to be four hours of non-stop tornado videos? Several of them brought young children, but this seminar is more like a college lecture with lots of graphs and charts and technical terms, and only the occasional cool video. The poor kids were bored silly, and people (even the ones without kids) started leaving in noticeable chunks after each speaker. Many of the people around me left, which was kind of nice in that I didn't have to hold my stuff on my lap anymore and it got a lot cooler without any people to be crammed like sardines next to. Still, now that the seminar is being streamed live, I think I may try that instead of going back.
Now excuse me while I get my weather geek on.
Tom Skilling -- Opening Remarks
Tom Skilling opened up by summarizing some of the historic weather events of the last year, including the tornado outbreak earlier this week. The 288 tornadoes that ripped through the South a few days ago shattered the record of 148 tornadoes previously held by the super outbreak in the Ohio River Valley in 1974.
There was also some footage of the tornado hitting Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. A passenger in a waiting area in Concourse C was shooting video of the lightning outside when you could suddenly hear a roaring sound and the windows started to bow out. Everyone ran, and the next image was of the broken windows and the rain pouring into the waiting area.
Skilling also showed a clip of himself on a storm chase with speaker Jim Reed in May 2010 where they wound up being chased down a road by a multiple vortex tornado. When they made it to a major highway, there were semis blown onto their sides all up and down the road.
Louis Uccellini -- Forecasting the Blizzards of 2010-2011
The director of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Prediction talked about modern forecast modeling and how it applied to last winter's blizzards in New York City and Chicago. Today's forecast models look at global weather patterns via satellite because conditions developing in the Pacific Ocean can lead to weather events in the Midwest or on the East Coast. Current forecast modeling computers are capable of performing 73.1 trillion calculations per second.
Unfortunately, modeling the weather isn't enough. There are human factors involved too that NOAA hasn't learned to successfully deal with yet. Even though the blizzard warning went out for New York City 14 hours in advance of the storm, the city didn't fully prepare for it because the storm arrived on Christmas Day, and who wants to pay double overtime to prepare for a storm that might not come, or might not be as severe as predicted? In Chicago, we were warned 24 hours in advance that the blizzard would arrive at 3:00 p.m., but my employer still chose not to close until 4:30, even though the blizzard actually arrived around a quarter to 3:00. And no one could have predicted that a bus accident would completely block Lake Shore Drive while 70 mph winds and snow falling at an inch an hour for 20 hours would prevent emergency services from clearing up the accident, stranding some people in their cars for as long as 14 hours.
Uccellini took questions at the end, and this is where I really started wondering why some of the new people were here. They certainly didn't seem to have any previous interest in the weather. The kids who had been paying attention asked some really good questions about whether El Niños and La Niñas had a predictable cycle and whether or not they were getting stronger, resulting in more violent weather outbreaks. The middle-aged adult behind me who was waving his hand around and yelling "Ooh! Ooh!" like Horshack wanted to know if we could get an EF5 tornado here and if the damage would be as bad as in the South. Well, (a) an EF5 tornado can happen anywhere, especially in the United States, even though they are statistically more likely to occur in some places more than others, and (b) the tornado classification scale is based on observed wind damage, so the damage caused by an EF5 tornado is going to be the same in Alabama as it is in Chicago as it is in Idaho. The adult in front of me wanted to know why there was so much bad weather in the middle of the country. Because he was apparently absent the day his elementary school science class covered what happens when warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico meets cool, dry air from the Rocky Mountains. Seriously, we have picture books at the library that explain this. I was not surprised when either of them left early.
Jim Angel -- February 2011 Blizzard's Impact
Poor Tom Skilling. There were three speakers in a row named Jim, and he introduced the wrong one. This Jim is a state climatologist with the Midwest Regional Climate Center who came to talk about the blizzard we had here last February, which I mostly knew about because I was there (see posts here, here, here, and here).
He did confirm something I'd noticed myself in that it's not until we get six inches of snow at once that things start going to hell in a handcart in terms of nightmarish travel times, school closures, and keeping up with snow removal. He also said that at one point during the blizzard nearly 7000 miles of Illinois highways were under a foot or more of snow all at the same time.
Jim Reed -- Storm Chaser: A Photographer's Journey
This is the one speaker all the people who had left early probably would have enjoyed seeing. Reed is a professional weather photographer/videographer who mostly came to pimp his book of weather photographs (which is available on Amazon and bears the same title as his talk).
Reed was also the storm chaser in the car with Tom Skilling that I mentioned before, being chased down a road by a multiple vortex tornado. Reed said he was amused that he'd sounded so calm on the video when the only thing going through his mind at the time was "Oh my God, I just killed Tom Skilling!"
This was also the only panel with a lot of photos and footage of storms, ranging from tornadoes to hurricanes to ice storms. One piece of footage showed why you can't afford to have tunnel vision while storm chasing. He was shooting photos of a tornado while his assistant was shooting video. Then she panned up and caught a second funnel forming directly over their heads. Fortunately, it never touched down. He also had footage of deer sprinting across a field trying to outrun a tornado and of his own chase vehicle being caught in a storm surge during a hurricane.
He made an off-hand comment about it being his former chase vehicle and someone asked what happened to it. Well, it survived the storm surge, hail, tornadoes, and over 300,000 miles of driving, only to be totaled by a 16-year-old with a brand new drivers license during a snowstorm in Colorado. He also mentioned, but didn't go into, how he had to stop filming hurricane landfalls after suffering PTSD-like symptoms after experiencing too many of them, and their aftermaths, in too short a time.
He was a really funny and entertaining speaker though, so I hope they have him back.
Jim Allsopp -- Tornadoes in the Chicago Area
Allsopp is the warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Chicago. His talk about tornadoes in the area was mostly filled with charts and graphs that I can't reproduce here, but he did have an interesting audio recording from the Oak Lawn tornado in 1967. The manager of the Coral Theater was taking a speech class and he brought a tape recorder outside the theater to record the reactions of passersby to the bad thunderstorm they were having that day. He wound up narrating the tornado as it roared through town, including the part where a car fell out of the sky and landed in the middle of 95th Street.
After a short intermission, there was a nine minute video of the tsunami in Japan pouring into one of the coastal harbors. Skilling chose to show it because it was a textbook example of how tsunamis behave, and he narrated it and pointed out the features to us as the video played.
Dr. Mary Ann Cooper -- Lightning Injury: What's Going On in the Other Countries
Dr. Cooper has been giving talks on lightning safety at this seminar for years. After decades of work in preventing lightning injuries in the U.S., she feels like her job here is mostly done; there were only 29 deaths caused by lightning last year. Now her focus is on preventing lightning injuries and deaths other countries, which has its own unique challenges.
The biggest problems are in developing nations. Some of the most frequent lightning activity in the world occurs in central Africa and northern India, where people tend to live on open plains in mud and thatch houses with no plumbing. In the U.S., the plumbing in the walls creates a Faraday cage effect that directs the lightning strike through the walls of the home instead of blasting straight through to the ground. In Africa and India, the strikes not only plow straight through, they also ignite the thatch roofs, which can then collapse on the occupants and burn them to death. These countries also don't have the forecasting resources available in more developed countries, and even if they did, there's no way to get the word to the remote villages in time, since many of them don't have electricity, let alone TVs or radios.
There are also cultural challenges that are proving to be an obstacle. In remoter parts of South Africa, people believe that a lightning strike victim was targeted by another villager who called down the strike as a curse, so revenge killings after people are struck by lightning are not uncommon. In Peru, lightning strike victims are often shunned because the people believe the victim has fallen out of favor with the gods. A person left alone in the Peruvian Andes in the winter, especially one suffering from the aftereffects of a lightning injury, doesn't have very good odds of survival.
Also, governments won't allocate resources for lightning injury prevention without statistics to prove it's worthwhile, but gathering the data is incredibly problematic due to the remoteness of some villages and the lack of reporting. The rural poor also tend to have more immediate problems (like feeding themselves and their families) than lightning.
With local culture being such a major factor, Dr. Cooper is focusing on putting interested parties in touch with each other to form their own working groups and come up with solutions that make sense for them and their countries.
Brian Smith -- Killer Winds: Do Not Ignore Thunderstorm Warnings
Smith is the warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service Office in Omaha, Nebraska, and if there's one thing he wanted everyone to take away from the seminar, it was DO NOT IGNORE SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNINGS. Most people blow them off because, hey, it's not like it's a tornado or anything. Yet wind is dangerous, even when it's not rotating. Straight line winds associated with severe thunderstorms can do as much damage as an EF2 tornado. Winds associated with some of these storms can exceed 100 mph. Most of the deaths associated from these winds are from falling trees that were blown over during the storm, but there is also a risk of sustaining a fatal head injury from hail.
Ed Fenelon -- Rip Currents: Killers on the Great Lakes
Fenelon is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Weather Forecast Office in Chicago. Most people associate rip currents (aka undertows or riptides) with ocean beaches, but the Great Lakes are enough of an inland sea to generate waves high enough to result in rip currents. In fact, there were 30 deaths on the Lakes from rip currents in 2010.
The problem is that rip currents occur where wave heights are the lowest, so those areas look most attractive to swimmers who don't realize what they're looking at. Rip currents are too strong for any human to swim against, but they're also very narrow. The best way to escape from one is to swim parallel to shore until you're free of it, then swim back to shore at an angle to avoid winding up back in it.
He also had many pictures of rip currents, which are surprisingly easy to spot once you know what to look for. Of course, it's also easier to spot them from the air than it is from the ground.
I really enjoyed the seminar this year. There have been some popular repeat talks, but this was the first time in many, many years that all of the talks were new, even if the speakers weren't.