gymengineer

There are minor annoying rounding issues-- stuff like 7.99" of snow instead of 8.0" or 33.1 F instead of 33 F---that need to be scrubbed out of a spreadsheet, but those should be relatively easy to fix. I just don't get the point of why they would have used the metric converted values to convert back to "English," instead of just using the original "English" values.

It was fewer steps to get the data. Also, it didn't have the weird conversion to metric then converted back to "English" units and there were many more co-ops to access. The revamp allows you to only access currently active co-ops, it looks like.

Utah State Climate site-- http://climate.usurf.usu.edu/mapGUI/mapGUI.php The new interface is less user friendly, but you can still figure it out, I'm sure.

lol...I don't see enough of your posts to know what your overall viewpoint on this is whereas I just happened to recall his general posture in this type of discussion. That's really all..and now he has answered my question.

Well I responded to your post because you seem to have very little patience for all the "what can be improved?" types of discussion. It really was just a question....and now you have clarified your answer. Thank you.

Ok,but you were agreeing with a post saying that people are just failing to accept that life sucks and crap happens. That's why I asked-- because by having service assessments in the first place, the organization is taking a position that there are improvements to be made to the service, and that we don't just have to accept that this tragedy should have happened in the way that it did.

Would you go as far as to say the recommendations in the service assessment are not valid then?

The aerial views starting around 1:06 are reminiscent of Teton '87 and the PA forest tornadoes '85.. although maybe not as wide as those monsters.

If you can get past the cheesy soundtrack, this video chronicles the storm from start to finish. My favorite part is between 1:05 and 1:45. So beautiful!

Midnight magic Two great time lapses:

We are all too disheartened this winter to even reminisce. Then I was young and unafraid.. And dreams were made and used and wasted There was no ransom to be paid No song unsung no wine untasted

Not that it matters, since the other map was just fine for an initial accumulation forecast, but this map wasn't posted until after the snow had already started. I mean, at that point, it's kind of an update rather than a forecast.

The only reason that I knew this was an earthquake pretty soon was that I experienced a 7.3 magnitude earthquake in Taiwan (11/14/1986). That earthquake woke me up and caused substantial, but scattered, damage across Taipei including some collapsed buildings. The shake from today's quake felt almost as strong and seemed longer than the Taiwan one. It was definitely cool to experience this earthquake with someone else who could nerd about it at the same time. I was conducting an introductory meeting with an Earth Science teacher when it happened. I asked her as the shaking started "Does this happen often in your building?" thinking that there was a nearby passing train. Then, when the shaking continued and intensified, we both realized it was an earthquake and stood up to look around the room. That's when that jolt that we all experienced happened, with the split-second thought of "If this gets any stronger, the building will begin to collapse." After it was over, she was giddy and said that one of her "bucket list" items just got crossed off. As the shaking died down, we began to guess at the epicenter and actually discussed the historic eastern quakes. I guessed a IV-V Mercalli intensity, but we didn't think it was a New Madrid quake as the shaking wasn't a rolling motion and didn't last >1 minute. We started talking about Charleston, SC, or maybe even Cape Ann/Boston. Somehow, we managed to finish our meeting, and then I was able to listen to WTOP in my car about where the earthquake epicenter was actually located.

The report implies at least spots of EF5 damage through that entire F5 band on the google map created by the Springfield office, which was much-discussed in this thread. While I agree with Josh that likely there wasn't that large a region of solid EF5 damage as literally depicted on the map (probably hard for them to acutally separate out the EF4 damage from the EF5 damage), it's still an incredible/unbelievable tornado that would cause consistently found instances of EF5 damage along such a long stretch. That's in contrast to the more usual scenario where like 5 houses receiving F5 damage can be isolated to a particular neighborhood.

You haven't been paying attention then.....without needing to do any outside research, just click back in this very thread and read the updates every single day.

Well, the locations that carry the "low-end" descriptor were never part of the most intense damage region from the original detailed survey, when the tornado was still rated a preliminary EF4. The quotes from the article also imply that more intense damage was to the east of the hospital area. I'd like to see the whole report, which is not up yet on the Springfield office website. I guess the newspaper got to see a draft version?

Unfortunately, for tornadoes, as a couple of mets have pointed out, there is no central body like the NHC doing these wind estimates. So wind estimates from event to event (by different offices) aren't going to be directly comparable-- at least not yet. Maybe someday in the future, there will be a "re-analysis" panel that will then compare these events to each other directly; I don't know that there will be a big push for that to happen though, since these ratings inherently carry a level of subjectivity with factors that the raters just will never know (from exact construction standards to even things like was the garage door open or closed, etc.).

Check back at the survey map page-- the Springfield office has attempted a preliminary damage contour map. It's hard for me to see on my computer screen if there is an additional darker shade inside the EF4 swath.... it looks that way, but the "darker" shade is almost indistinguishable to my eyes. Can the rest of you see it more clearly? ETA: The "5" markers are still there in the same locations.

Yeah, I read that massive thread after the Tuscaloosa tornado about what advice to give on-air.... I don't have a strong opinion on this since I don't have stats to analyze on the topic, but just wanted to point out the difference in phrasing between the KFOR weatherman and the Birmingham weatherman (James Spann, was it?). As for the storm speed factor, that was discussed in the Service Assessment for the Super Tuesday outbreak that I linked above.

I think many of you would be interested to read the NWS Service Assessment after the Super-Tuesday Tornado Outbreak in 2008: http://www.weather.gov/os/assessments/pdfs/super_tuesday.pdf Here were the first few of the findings and recommendations: "Finding 1: Relatively few of the tornado warnings or statements contained wording or call to action statements indicating the urgency and danger of the situation, even when tornadoes and damage were confirmed (i.e., "this is an extremely dangerous and life- threatening situation"). Recommendation 1a: NWS Instruction 10-511 should provide guidance on using wording and call to action statements in tornado warnings and severe weather statements that convey appropriate urgency and danger. Recommendation 1b: WDTB should develop training for warning forecasters on how and when to use explicit wording that conveys the urgency and danger of a situation. Finding 2a: Some media partners interviewed prefer more definitive tornado warnings and SVSs. Finding 2b: A majority of the tornado warnings contained wording such as "Doppler Radar indicated a severe thunderstorm capable of producing a tornado." It is phrases such as this that make it unclear whether or not there is a tornado on the ground. Recommendation 2: The NWS should provide guidance on wording that increases the chances of improved public response during tornadic events where tornadoes have been confirmed. Clear wording such as "a tornado has been confirmed…" or "a tornado is on the ground at...and is moving…" should increase the probability that a warning will get an appropriate and immediate response. Finding 3: There was no coordination between WFO Nashville and WFO Louisville on the Allen County tornado warning. Recommendation 3: NWS should require regions to develop severe weather coordination procedures between neighboring offices." Do any of you know in more detail how much progress has been made on these first three recommendations?

The "tornado emergency" wording has helped, but is not an officially consistent policy across forecast areas yet. Perhaps there will be a push to standardize the usage across all offices after the NWS Service Assessments from these tornado outbreaks? Assuming this list from wikipedia is accurate-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_previously_issued_tornado_emergencies -- you can notice some prominent tornadoes not getting such a warning and others that did but probably didn't require one based on the criteria established by the Des Moines office (http://www.crh.noaa.gov/images/dmx/Media%20Advisory%202010-01.pdf). "A large and catastrophic tornado has been confirmed and will continue (A radar signature alone is not sufficient) It is going to have a high impact and/or affect a highly vulnerable population (Historically, this probably has happened once every 10 years in our warning area.) Numerous fatalities expected." I don't think just having tornado emergency warnings standardized will solve the problem of high death tolls. I agree with Ian that communication is a key issue-- I'm envisioning a well-coordinated training and cooperation system to link the NWS mets to the TV mets during "tornado emergency" situations, with a standardized template listing key points to emphasize during the TV coverage about how dire the impending situation is. In addition to a standardized "tornado emergency" use, how about a "confirmed" Tornado Warning vs. a "radar-indicated" Tornado Warning? I know the wording is already included in the warning text itself, and any new warning in a life-and-death type weather phenomenon is going to take lots of outreach and public education. But, maybe that would eventually help the public understand that in a specific type of warning, you need to get underground now. And as for what to do in potential F4/F5's---a topic that came up in threads after the AL tornado outbreak in April-- I did hear the KFOR met say something extraordinary during the peak of the OK outbreak. He explicitly used the phrasing "get out of the way" many times in addition to the "get underground" phrasing. While he did not tell people to get in their cars and drive away from the tornado, his phrasing implied that in a general sense, you might not survive if you were in the path of the tornado while at home.

Well 1500 people are/were unaccounted for, not missing like those bodies swept out to sea that will never be recovered after a tsunami. In Tuscaloosa, that number went from 400 down to 12 without an appreciable increase in the death toll. Probably the vast majority of the still missing will be accounted for, alive, in the coming days. (Out of town, etc..)

Those Mike Bettes videos still get to me.....that raw emotion coming upon the scene, with a 'national'-type anchor describing seeing the dead bodies and injuries and then breaking down even more in later live shots. Maybe especially since he is normally one of the more wooden Weather Channel on air mets, just groomed in his role for his height and his looks, it's stirring to see him break down like this.

I think the Moore tornado was just so well covered on live TV as it was still early in its track to the south of the immediate OKC suburbs (wall-to-wall news coverage) that people were as well warned as they ever would be for such an event. That 36 death toll would not have happened with a somewhat weaker tornado and really showed what a monster the storm was to be able to still kill over 30 in such a well-warned situation. The F4 in 2003 that caused F3 damage in Moore didn't cause any fatalities. As for Pleasant Grove-- maybe it was that the tornado lifted somewhat shy of downtown Birmingham? The Tuscaloosa/Birmingham tornado this past April in Jefferson County went over a similar area and killed 19. I remember the death toll over 30 for Pleasant Grove was already shocking. But for my entire lifetime until this year, it seemed like around 30 was kind of the ceiling for number of deaths in the most monstrous of tornadoes. Any death toll over 10 in a single tornado was a multi-cycle national news story (like Andover in '91, Catoosa '93).

[quote name='HurricaneJosh' timestamp='1306153442' post='704301' Re: the hospital... It's beaten up, but the actual structure looks to be intact, based on the images I've seen. Yup-- I saw the photos of the structure. I meant that perhaps in a hospital, you have people who cannot easily move out of a room (to get them away from windows, flying debris, etc.) all concentrated in one building... kind of like the heart wrenching stories we read after Katrina about the doctors and nurses struggling with moving some of their patients up to higher levels when the storm surge came in. But of course, that was just a guess I threw out there-- probably not correct.