was this warranted?

there's a hurricane warning in effect for the entire region. there have been dire warnings posted for a while now, such as the one i put on here yesterday.

and then this morning comes this:

BULLETIN - EAS ACTIVATION REQUESTED
TORNADO WARNING
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW ORLEANS LA
725 AM CDT MON AUG 29 2005

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN NEW ORLEANS HAS ISSUED A

* TORNADO WARNING FOR THE EYEWALL OF HURRICANE KATRINA FOR...
  ST. TAMMANY PARISH IN SOUTHEAST LOUISIANA
  HANCOCK COUNTY IN SOUTHERN MISSISSIPPI
  THIS INCLUDES THE CITIES OF...WAVELAND...DIAMONDHEAD...BAY ST.
  LOUIS
  HARRISON COUNTY IN SOUTHERN MISSISSIPPI
  THIS INCLUDES THE CITIES OF...LONG BEACH...GULFPORT

* UNTIL 930 AM CDT

* AT 725 AM CDT...NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR INDICATED
THE LEADING EDGE OF THE HURRICANE KATRINA EYEWALL APPROACHING THE
SOUTHERN PORTIONS OF ST. TAMMANY...HANCOCK...AND HARRISON COUNTIES.

* THE ONSET OF DESTRUCTIVE WINDS WITH GUSTS OF 100 TO 120 MPH WILL
BEGIN SOON. THESE DESTRUCTIVE WINDS WILL PRODUCE WIND DAMAGE SIMILAR
TO A TORNADO. SEEK SHELTER ON THE LOWEST FLOOR OF THE BUILDING IN AN
INTERIOR HALLWAY OR ROOM SUCH AS A CLOSET. STAY AWAY FROM WINDOWS
AND REMAIN IN YOUR SAFE SHELTER UNTIL THE EYEWALL PASSES.

LAT...LON 3010 8962 3029 8899 3059 8905 3045 8990

so what do you think?

chilling statement

this morning, nws new orleans released this statement. it speaks for itself.

URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW ORLEANS LA
1011 AM CDT SUN AUG 28 2005

...DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED...

.HURRICANE KATRINA...A MOST POWERFUL HURRICANE WITH UNPRECEDENTED STRENGTH...RIVALING THE INTENSITY OF HURRICANE CAMILLE OF 1969.

MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS...PERHAPS LONGER. AT LEAST ONE HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL...LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY DAMAGED OR DESTROYED.

THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL. PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED. ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. CONCRETE BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENTS WILL SUSTAIN MAJOR DAMAGE...INCLUDING SOME WALL AND ROOF FAILURE.

HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY...A FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT.

AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD...AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS...PETS...AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK.

POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS...AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF NATIVE TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING...BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED. FEW CROPS WILL REMAIN. LIVESTOCK LEFT EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL BE KILLED.

AN INLAND HURRICANE WIND WARNING IS ISSUED WHEN SUSTAINED WINDS NEAR HURRICANE FORCE...OR FREQUENT GUSTS AT OR ABOVE HURRICANE FORCE...ARE CERTAIN WITHIN THE NEXT 12 TO 24 HOURS.

ONCE TROPICAL STORM AND HURRICANE FORCE WINDS ONSET...DO NOT VENTURE OUTSIDE!

katrina

as i write this, i'm watching the news and reading the national hurricane center website.

katrina is a category 5 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 150 knots, with gusts to 185 knots.

wow.

it's making a beeline for new orleans. if it hits just east of the big easy, it could be catastrophic. lake pontchartrain is just north and east of them. with a storm surge of nearly 35 feet expected and 10 inches of rain to fall, it'll be bad. add in the 150 knot winds from the north, from the direction of the lake (which is higher than the city), and you have some serious potential that i don't even want to think about.

images

i got a message from piotr the other day, about the picture cds. i'll post it here.

Hey.

I am currently working on a site with the best pictures from the trip. I have to sort through roughly 100 pictures and pick the best. I will also tweak them a bit for optimal results. I should have the site up before the 30th of September. I will keep you guys updated. A CD of all the digital pictures taken of the trip will be available too through the next term of university. More to follow soon.

Take care,
Pete

the quarter game

at the office sometimes we (i, mostly, although wxdog taught it to me) use a powerful forecast training tool.

it's called the quarter game.

the premise is this: you are allowed to use any information sources you like (be they the spc, the paspc, models, real data, whatever) and you are given a deadline. at the deadline you draw a quarter-sized circle on a map where you think the most (reported) severe weather will occur. anywhere in north america. the maps we use are sized such that a quarter's diameter is approximately 200 km, maybe a bit more.

the bet varies, but the standard is that each person puts in the quarter he/she circled and the winner takes all the quarters. recently i've been getting ice cream for the winner. other times it's just a friendly bet for pride, but the point is that it serves as a powerful learning tool as to what works and what doesn't for forecasting severe weather.

today i'm duking it out with eze, and as of this posting i'm marginally ahead. he has 7 reports and i have 8. but mostly it's fun to watch our forecasts turn out right or wrong and then to figure out why.

and for the record, sometimes i win and sometimes i lose. but everyone learns. and that's really what it's all about.

a quick note

before now, you had to be a member of blogger.com to post a message in the comments section.

that will be no more.

from now on, at least as a trial, i've changed the settings to allow anonymous comments. if you want to comment, and you're not a blogger.com member, please do. i just ask that there be no profanity.

thanks.

input, please

so now i'm going to slap together a page on weather central for next year's chasing course. i'll talk about what we did this year, what the course entails, and i'll maybe show some pictures.

so first of all, if you have any ideas or recommendations, please let myself or one of the other instructors know. we can't improve the course all that effectively without input from you, the students.

second, i haven't been able to get my hands on any pictures from anyone yet, so if you wouldn't mind emailing them to me, i would greatly appreciate it. as well, if you do send pictures, please indicate if weather central has your permission to use them on the site for purposes (only) of promoting next year's course, and the courses of future years. if you don't want me to potentially use your pictures, that's fine--i just want to have an image diary of our first chase as a university course.

hopefully there'll be many many more. :)

my most frustrating chase busts

well, i can only speak for myself (dave). but here are a couple of my worst.

oddly enough, it doesn't involve days when i got a sunburn.

nope, my worst busts involve bad decisions on tornadic days.

these both actually happened on the same trip, in the summer of 2001. wxdog and i were chasing with the college of dupage folks, on their first trip to canada (although at the time we were in north dakota).

thinking about this, i wonder if it might have been 2 busts on the same day. wxdog? paul? anyone?

one of them involved a bad road decision. we were in minot and it was evident storms would be going up in a hurry to our northwest. well, we got out of town and took the highway that goes northwest from there. this was a bad idea for a couple of reasons. first, this highway goes through a valley, and we couldn't see too far away. second, and what really sunk us, i think, is that there was significant construction going on along this road at the time. (now that i think about it, it seems this is the same area where the construction was going on for that nighttime drive from estevan to minot. hmmm.) you see, as we were just descending into the valley, the contrast was lowered just enough so that i could see the base of the storm that was blasting up toward our west-northwest. it appeared to have a wall cloud (and maybe a tornado) underneath it. but i really mean that i got a glimpse of it before the terrain got in the way. something on the order of a second, maybe two. then we hit the road construction a few minutes later and when we finally got out of the valley, the storm had gusted out. d'oh!

the second bust i want to talk about here is also in northeastern montana and western north dakota. we had been chasing around williston, and a storm blasted off and gave us not much but then the winds turned around to northwest. turkey towers then ensued. that made us decide to break off the chase. bad move! as it turned out, it was just a localized outflow from the storm--farther off to our west, the winds were still from the ese and the moisture was impressive. as we sat down to dinner, we heard about a long-lived (like 2-3 hours) tornadic supercell in northeastern montana. this was in an area where we could easily have gotten to, had we only taken the time to access the spc's mesoscale discussion page.

so i guess this post iterates the need for a couple of things while chasing. the first important thing is a constant information stream, be it from a nowcaster at home or from a library or from (if you're so lucky) wi-fi networks or from a cell modem. the second important thing is a constantly alert navigator. someone who is on top of all the construction as well as what the roads will lead to, as well as someone who's always searching for alternate routes and escape routes when in intercept mode.

even then, as this year proved, you can't always get tornadoes.

storms are going....

it's about 10:30 pm and storms have finally started in western manitoba.

they started near where i had thought they would go, although a persistent field of cumulus made me think they'd go earlier than they did.

so far there are no reports of anything severe, but radar indicated hail up to the size of golf balls.

this could be an interesting night. will the storms continue until they reach winnipeg? stay tuned...

d'oh!

well, tomorrow looks like it could be a very explosive day. and wouldn't you know it--i have to work a night shift.

both the gem and nam seem to agree that there's going to be a surface low (trigger, shear) between broadview, sk and virden, mb tomorrow late afternoon/evening. ngm and gfs have it a touch farther north, but it's the same general location. most models seem to agree on having a subtle short-wave trough moving through the area at the same time (instability), and mid-level wind speeds around 40 to 50 knots (shear). the question, as is always the question when we get into august, is moisture. is there rich enough moisture going to be in place? well, current dewpoints in (especially) southwest manitoba aren't too bad--they're in the 15 to 19 degree range. with a day or so of intense heating giving evapotranspiration in the area as well as continued advection of the moisture in place from the northern plains through to the corn belt, i think moisture might end up not being a problem. will it be deep enough? that remains to be seen.

bottom line? if i weren't working tomorrow evening, i'd wake up in the morning, do an analysis (a good forecast stems always from a good analysis, right?) and likely head out the door in the direction of virden. (psst, they have a good library there.)