Monday, February 28, 2011

28 February 2011 Too much of nothing, no one has control!

Too much knowledge can lay you out cold, render you incapable of using that knowledge in a useful manner. Sorting out the useful from the useless becomes problematic.

I attended a storm spotter workshop Saturday. Most of the presentation focused upon spotting tornadoes and other thunderstorm related events, and relaying warnings of those events to the appropriate offices for use in protecting the public.

I’ve been interested in meteorology for most of my life. I’ve read educational material, studied textbooks and field guides in an effort to become better informed.

Tornadic events put me on edge and keep me there. The earliest recall of a tornado I have is of the storm that struck Cape Girardeau MO in 1951. Since then I’ve been present for storms in Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Florida, Texas, and Nebraska. I’ve seen many of the storm related phenomenon that make them so interesting. Straws driven into trees, chickens explosively plucked by the low pressure of the storm, and other oddities are easily explained and hard to replicate.

There is a lot of information available to amateur meteorologists these days. We can tap directly into NSW and commercial radar feeds, download maps and models of storm predictions and old models of storm histories. There is more data than amateurs with home weather stations can process capably.

The prediction for severe thunderstorms to occur today in N.E TN appeared Saturday. It was easy to see the storms build into Kansas City and other areas west of us. Today’s radar maps showed a solid squall line in Kentucky and Tennessee, drifting in our direction. The intensity of the line was high and displayed some serious radar characteristics projecting high winds. Wind and lightning are the primary problems forecast for us.

Seeing this radar, I was tempted strongly to stay home and watch the storms develop. The dog would have been happy for me to do that, as she is not a gun or storm dog. But I wouldn’t be able to change any outcome if I missed school. So here, I am between classes, watching the radar just as I would be doing if I were home. It looks as if we had some very heavy rain. Until I get home I’ll have no way to know what actually occurred as the squall line blew through.

It’s a real case of knowing too much to be comfortable and too little to be effective. Right now, the ETSU campus is receiving heavy intermittent rain, perhaps some dime-sized hail, and some distant thunder is audible.

Oddly enough, there was a large amount of carry –over from the storm-spotting course to my Volcanology discussion of plumes today. Both of those topics center on fluid mechanics. Once the relationship is apparent, it is interesting to see the visual similarities in the volcanic plume and the thunderstorm super cell.

Today we live at the intersection of “high wind warning” and “flashflood warning.” The creek is still running very high from last week’s rain. Depending upon the storm and its aftermath, dinner tonight will be pizza or peanut butter and jelly.

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