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I owe my career to Unidata

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You may wonder how a site called “Funnel Fiasco” came to have so much technology content. It all traces back to an email I sent my freshman year of college. But it’s also directly attributable to the work done at Unidata. Funded by the National Science Foundation for decades, Unidata is a cornerstone of atmospheric science education, providing software and data services. Tragically, Unidata furloughed almost all staff on Friday thanks to the assholes running the government.

A fateful email

Early in my freshman year, Dr. Jon Schrage was giving a tour of the Earth & Atmospheric Sciences facilities in Purdue’s Civil Engineering Building. (Ed note — Earth & Atmospheric Sciences is now Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. The Civil Engineering Building is now Hampton Hall. I will use the names as they were in my time as an undergraduate.) He mentioned that he’d be doing a training on the WXP software soon if anyone wanted to learn how to use it.

Reader, I very much did. So I showed up to the Civil Engineering Building on a Wednesday night. For the next two hours, I learned how to use WXP to make weather maps. At the end of the session, Jon mentioned that he was a visiting professor and his appointment was up at the end of the year. He didn’t know who would be maintaining the software the following year.

When I got back to my room, high on the thrill of weather plots, I sat down and sent him an email. With all of the confidence of a mediocre white man, I sent this: “I’m just a freshman who doesn’t know what he’s doing, but I’ll do it.” It’s been almost 24 years, but I’m pretty sure those were my exact words.

Did I know how to use Unix (specifically FreeBSD)? No! Did I know anything about the software? No! Was I going to let that stop me? Absolutely not.

Amazingly, the department hired me. That got me through my undergraduate years and set me up to accidentally fall into a career in technology. I’d say it has worked out pretty well so far.

Where Unidata fits in

The astute reader may notice that so far the tale centers on my overconfidence. So where does Unidata fit in?

Unidata created and maintains the Local Data Manager (LDM) software. LDM allows universities and other users to reliably share meteorological data in near-real time. From models, to observations, to satellite images, to radar data, LDM provides a robust transport mechanism. A big part of my job was administering the software and providing help to students and faculty who needed data.

The department flew me to Boulder for an in-person training workshop where I learned LDM in greater depth. Later on, I returned to Boulder for training on GEMPAK, another weather visualization and analysis suite.

The software and the training helped me become a valuable contributor my department’s education and research missions. This is what led to me getting a full-time Linux sysadmin role the summer after I graduated. No doubt there are many others like me out there — not to mention all of the forecasters and researchers who learned about the atmosphere with the help of Unidata’s work.

The Unidata staff — as well as so many other federal grant recipients, contractors, and employees — deserve far better than this administration has given them.

Should we care where EF5 tornadoes have gone?

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Anthony W. Lyza, Harold E. Brooks, and Makenzie J. Krocak have an early-access paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society wondering where the EF5s have gone. This paper is an interesting look at the extended “drought” in the strongest category of tornadoes. The title of my post is not questioning the value of their work, but the paper does make me wonder about the value of tornado ratings for the general public.

Ratings for research and forecasting

There’s certainly value for scientific research and forecasting. Because ratings are assigned based on damage, which is what people ultimately care about, there are benefits in being able to use large data sets to find patterns. “Which environments tend to produce more destructive tornadoes?” is an important question to know the answer to. The more warning we can give (at least to some extent) of the possibility of strong tornadoes, the more time people have to take appropriate precautions.

Of course, the EF rating system has flaws. Damage assessment, while greatly improved over the years, still involves subjective decisions. In addition, binning a spectrum always results in some funkiness (that’s the scientific term). The difference between 165 and 166 mph wouldn’t meaningfully change the damage caused by a tornado, but — assuming we could accurately measure tornadoes in order to rate them — would be the difference between and EF3 and EF4 rating. And there’s the question of whether or not six ratings (and the location of the boundaries) is the “best” approach. To wit: there are a variety of different categorizations of the ratings. Are any of them better suited?

Ratings for the public

But even with the value for science, do tornado ratings provide value to the public? As I wrote eight (!!) years ago, “even though the U.S. has avoided major hurricanes, it has not avoided major damage.” Even though, unlike hurricanes, tornado ratings are based on damage, the impact to people’s lives doesn’t necessarily correlate to the rating. If your house is destroyed, does it really matter if the tornado was rated EF4 or EF5? Your house is still destroyed. Even an EF2 or EF3 can render well-built homes unlivable.

Shrug emoji

Like Lyza et al, I have questions, not answers. The public knows about EF ratings, thanks t movies like “Twister” and “Twisters”. That bell can’t be un-rung. There’s a certain degree of American competitiveness involved, too. But maybe it’s time to stop making a big deal of it?

New Forecast Discussion Hall of Fame entry

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Last week, WYMT meteorologist and fellow 812 native Erik Dean shared a great forecast discussion from the Riverton, Wyoming office. As Erik said “come for the forecast, leave hungry!” I’m hungry after reading it and I just ate lunch an hour ago. It’s now the newest entry in the world-famous Funnel Fiasco Forecast Discussion Hall of Fame.

When I got to the end, I said “of course it’s Chris Hattings.” Chris has several entries already, so it’s good to see he hasn’t lost his touch.

Hurricane Lee forecast game

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Update: we have a winner!

It took longer than I’d have liked to publish the results of this contest. I was traveling out of the country. But I’d like to congratulate KP on winning the Lee forecast contest.

One thing that I realized after the fact: my changes below made it so only whole numbers could be used for latitude and longitude. I’ve fixed that for next time!

Original post

The prodigal game returns! A technical glitch ruined the Dorian contest in 2019, so we haven’t seen a Funnel Fiasco tropical forecast game since Hurricane Matthew in 2016. But I’m pleased to announce that we’re up and running for Hurricane Lee. You can submit your landfall forecast by 2100 UTC on Wednesday 13 September.

In keeping with tradition, we’re still using the same crappy Perl script I wrote in 2005. Despite the fact that I’ve been putting off a total rewrite for over a decade, I did make a few improvements recently:

  • Numerical fields now require numeric input. If you were hoping to submit “butts” as your wind speed, I’m sorry to disappoint you.
  • Coordinates are constrained to reasonable ranges. I refuse to give in to Kevin’s whining about west being negative numbers. (I believe my exact words to him were “take it up with the Prime Meridian.”) But I was feeling magnanimous so I’ve constrained the latitude to 0–90 degrees north and the longitude to 180 degrees west to 10 degrees east.
  • Similarly, wind speed is now constrained to realistic values. You can’t submit a wind speed less than zero or above 200 miles per hour.
  • Furtherly similar, the time segments can’t be negative or overflow.

So go ahead and submit your forecast by 2100 UTC on Wednesday so you can join in the grand tradition.

Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption pressure wave in Indiana

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Over the weekend, the volcanic island of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai erupted in the south Pacific. People as far away as Alaska heard the sound. Here in Indiana, we did not. But we were able to detect the shock wave from the explosion as a rapid pressure change.

Graph of barometric pressure at my house showing an abrupt rise and fall in pressure as the shock wave passed on Saturday morning.

In fact, you can watch it cross the continental US by plotting the pressure changes, as Daryl Herzmann did.

A little after midnight, the pressure wave came around from the other side of the globe. Alerted to this possibility by Daniel Dawson, I grabbed the graph from my weather station again.

Graph of barometric pressure at my house showing an slight rise and dramatic fall in pressure as the shock wave passed again on Sunday morning.

I don’t have much to add. It’s just a neat example of how our planet works. Some of the satellite imagery is absolutely mesmerizing. Unfortunately, it sounds like the damage to nearby islands may be catastrophic. The BBC reported that some islands may have been completely covered by seawater. Tonga is already gravely threatened by rising sea levels, and disasters like this can only make the situation worse.

Edited 17 January 2022 at 3pm EST to say the pressure wave came from the other direction, not around again. Thanks to Shelley Melchior for the correction.

New haiku in the Forecast Discussion Hall of Fame

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A couple of friends independently directed me to a recent forecast discussion from Peachtree (Atlanta). Forecaster Kyle Thiem embraced his inner poet when he wrote the long-term discussion entirely in haiku. (Full disclosure: I didn’t count syllables to verify.) The discussion is now forever enshrined in the Forecast Discussion Hall of Fame.

Chase results: 26 June 2021 near Hoopeston, IL

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On Friday, I was looking at the radar and I thought “gee, that storm a few miles away from me looks like it might have a little bit of rotation.” I talked myself out of it. This means, of course, that it produced two tornadoes an 18 minute drive from my house. On Saturday when I saw some storms getting their spin on in central Illinois, I refused to be fooled again. So I woke my girlfriend from a nap and we got in the car heading toward Paxton.

As we pulled into Hoopeston, I had a choice to make. There were some cells popping up from Paxton to Mahomet that looked interesting but not particularly spinny. The main squall line was meh except further north. I had to pick an option. My risks were basically “nothing happens” to the south or “stuff happens but you can’t see it” to the north. Given the choices, I decided to engage to the south.

Storm 1

  • Screen shot of radar reflectivity (top) and storm relative velocity (bottom) from KILX at 4:24 PM CDT.
  • Screen shot of radar reflectivity (top) and storm relative velocity (bottom) from KILX at 4:43 PM CDT. The circled storm was the first one I targeted after getting into Illinois.

We turned down IL 1 toward Rossville. I figured we’d cut west from there to get under the storms. Unfortunately, the storms were speeding up, and I quickly decided that staying near IL 9 was the better option. We took a county road back north and made it all the way to IL 9 when we encountered a flooded roadway. With John Fausett in mind, we turned around (and didn’t drown) after driving about half a mile in reverse. We picked the next county road west and went north.

The storm was near Rankin at this point and it seemed to be showing some signs of rotation. We stopped to watch it for a few minutes and saw some lowerings, but there was no spinning.

  • View to the north of the first storm. Taken at 5:14 PM CDT just south of IL 9 from N 1300 E Road.
  • Lowerings from the first storm. Taken at 5:17 PM CDT about 1 mile northwest of Hoopeston. View is to the north-northwest.
  • Screen shot of radar reflectivity (top) and storm relative velocity (bottom) from KILX at 5:26 PM CDT. Location and direction of view as given on the image.
  • View of the second storm from the first storm position. Taken at 5:28 PM CDT. View is to the southwest.

After a few minutes, it was time to reposition again. The storm had become uninteresting, so I decided to follow it’s friend slightly to the south. From our position looking southwest, it looked pretty nice.

Storm 2

We dropped south a bit to meet it and then followed east and a little north to watch it further. At that point, we were a little east of Wellington. The lowering maybe showed a little bit of weak rotation, but it was never obvious. After a few minutes, it became an mess.

  • Lowering from the second storm. Taken at 5:35 PM CDT from about 2 miles north of Hoopeston. View is to the northwest.
  • Screen shot of radar reflectivity (top) and storm relative velocity (bottom) from KILX at 5:38 PM CDT. Location and direction of view as given on the image.
  • Lowering from the second storm. Taken at 5:50 PM CDT from about 2 miles east of Wellington. View is to the northwest.
  • Lowering from the second storm. Taken at 5:51 PM CDT from about 2 miles east of Wellington. View is to the northwest.

The end

These storms were basically done (although there was a report of a funnel cloud near Earl Park, IN later). There were some tornado warnings in the line near Villa Grove. After driving through near-zero visibility on the east side of Hoopeston, we went south on IL 1 for a little bit. But after a few minutes, the line looked less interesting and it didn’t seem worth staying out for. Also, the bag of Combos that I ate was not a reasonable dinner.

We managed to beat the line back to Lafayette by 5-10 minutes. For an unplanned chase, I’m okay with how this turned out. I feel like the decisions I made were reasonable, which was not a given considering I haven’t seriously chased in ten-plus years. Missing a photogenic tornado minutes from my house still stings, but I feel good about doing this again in the future.

New entries in the Forecast Discussion Hall of Fame

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Well it took approximately forever, but I finally got around to updating the back end tech for my website (post coming soon!). That means I can catch up on a backlog of Forecast Discussion Hall of Fame nominees.

I have added four new entries to the Social Media Foyer: tweets from NWS offices in Atlanta, Paducah, and Pittsburgh, as well as a Facebook post from Nashville. Plus: a Public Information Statement that includes a map, a Santa Claus watch, forecasters in Juneau telling you to go outside, a sweet discussion with no tricks, an “I’m only doing this because I have to”, a not-so-super Mario, and monster wrestling. Because you’ve all been so patient, there’s also a new entry in the ISIXTYFIVE section where he comes to the conclusion that he sucks.

Some of these have been sitting in my inbox since January 2018, so I apologize in being slow to add them. You get what you pay for sometimes.

Proposed tweaks to severe thunderstorm warnings

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The National Weather Service (NWS) is collecting public comment on some proposed changes to severe thunderstorm warnings. These changes would add damage threat labels for wind and hail threats. The three tiers are (no label), considerable, and destructive.

CategoryWindHail
(no label)> 60 mph> 1.0″
Considerable> 70 mph> 1.75″
Destructive> 80 mph> 2.75″

As part of the proposal, the NWS says, they will recommend that destructive severe thunderstorms trigger a wireless emergency alert (WEA) message. This means most modern cell phones will receive an alert for the highest-end storms. According to an analysis by Joseph Patton, this would apply to just over 1% of severe thunderstorm warnings. (This percentage will vary by time and location.)

I am 100% on board with this proposal. Let’s be honest with ourselves: most people ignore severe thunderstorm warnings. I’ll be the first to admit that I do. Once I’m inside, I’m safe enough without taking extra precautions. But those top-end storms can do damage similar to tornadoes. Being able to distinguish between “get inside” and “get to the basement” severe storms is helpful.

Now I’ve suggested before that tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings should be combined into a single product. I still hold that opinion. Intensity of the threat matters more than the specific mechanics of the threat. But I very much doubt the NWS will implement that idea any time soon. This proposal at least allows for cleaner communication of the most life-threatening thunderstorms.

You can give the NWS your own opinion via online survey before July 30, 2020.

Sporting events should let meteorologists make weather decisions

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Sporting events — particularly in the spring and summer when they’re generally done outdoors — present a hazard to participants and spectators alike. Thunderstorms can send a bolt of lightning in an instant, which can prove lethal. Part of the danger is that lightning can strike miles away from the storm, which means people who think they aren’t at risk might be very much at risk.

Many leagues and venues have adopted a largely sensible lighting policy. If lightning strikes within a certain radius, the activity is suspended and everyone is sent to shelter. After some amount of time without a strike (often 30 minutes), the activity resumes. This is, as a general concept, good advice.

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as “if you can see it, flee it. If you can hear it, clear it.” That’s the advice given to the public because it’s simple and easy to remember. But it doesn’t always capture the full story.

To give an example, this summer my local baseball team was playing a game as thunderstorms approached the area. A lightning strike occurred within the 10 mile radius defined by the Prospect League (as an aside, I appreciate the fact that they increased it from the 5 miles it used to be). The umpires suspended play late in the game (it was the 8th inning if I recall).

The trouble with this is that the storm was traveling perpendicular to the stadium. The strike that triggered the delay was well away from the storm and just inside the 10 mile radius. Essentially, it was as close as lightning would come. In this case, continuing play would be a safe decision. And it would have meant pitchers could stay warm and the crowd would have stuck around.

When it comes to weather safety, I’d always prefer overcaution to undercaution. But weather is complex, and the simple rules don’t always fit the situation. Sporting events should always leave weather decisions to meteorologists. High-profile near-misses have raised awareness, but it’s still not universal.