More tornadoes for the Plains
Severe weather and tornadoes continued to pound the Plains yesterday, and more severe weather is on the way today. On Thursday, four tornadoes ripped through Oklahoma, including a twister that hit the northwest suburbs of Oklahoma City. This tornado damaged 50 buildings and injured four people. All of the injuries were were people in mobile homes or vehicles, as is typical for tornado victims. Thursday's four twisters came a day after 65 tornadoes swept through Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska, killing four people. A tornado in Holly, Colorado did extensive damage, killing one person and injuring eleven. It was the first tornado fatality in Colorado since 1960. The two tornado fatalities in Oklahoma Wednesday were that state's first deaths in five years. One other person died in a tornado that struck the Texas Panhandle Wednesday. Several of Wednesday's tornadoes were strong EF2s with winds of 111 - 135 mph. Damage surveys have not yet been completed on the Holly, CO tornado, and most of the other 65 tornadoes from that day.
Expect another significant severe weather outbreak late this afternoon in the Plains, according to the latest severe weather outlook from the Storm Prediction Center. They have placed Central Texas, including Dallas/Fort Worth, in their "Moderate Risk" area for severe weather. Four tornadoes have already touched down in Texas this morning, but none caused significant damage. Flash flooding and large hail--including baseball sized hail--have also occurred in Southwest Texas this morning. Keep an eye on the Central Texas radar (Figure 1) all day, as these severe thunderstorms grow in intensity and start spawning tornadoes.
Figure 1. Current radar for Central Texas.
Jeff Masters
In the Kansas Colorado and Nebraska there were reported 60+ tornadoes
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Bad storms again from the same system..a very slow mover.
Christmas wind that winter. Seas were calm through Dec. & Jan, with no trade winds.
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IS NOW LOCATED NEAR 6.3N 156.9E, APPROXIMATELY 300 NM EAST OF CHUUK.
RECENT ANIMATED MULTISPECTRAL SATELLITE IMAGERY AND A 302002Z SSMI
IMAGE REVEAL FLARING CONVECTION ON THE NORTHERN QUADRANTS OF A DEV-
ELOPING LOW LEVEL CIRCULATION CENTER EVIDENT IN A 301937Z QUIKSCAT
IMAGE. UPPER LEVEL ANALYSIS INDICATES A FAVORABLE ENVIRONMENT FOR
DEVELOPMENT WITH GOOD POLEWARD OUTFLOW AND LOW TO MODERATE VERTICAL
WIND SHEAR.
Link
What a hectic season for that part of the globe so far . . .
SST 28-29C, vertical wind shear low to moderate. (10 to 20 knots)
Maximum sustained winds at the center is 18 to 22 knots with a minimum sea level pressure near 1002 mb
The potential of this disturbance to form into a significant tropical cyclone within the next 12 to 24 hours is upgraded to GOOD.
By Ken Kaye
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Posted March 31 2007
It can portray a hurricane in stunning detail. It's powered by a supercomputer that can perform 14 trillion calculations a second. And starting in June, it should help tropical meteorologists project whether a storm will arrive as a killer or a creampuff.
The sophisticated new forecast model could be the Holy Grail that forecasters have long sought to sharply improve their hurricane intensity predictions and give emergency managers and residents alike more time to prepare accordingly.
"This is the first time a hurricane model will have its own analysis of the center of the hurricane's structure," said Naomi Surgi of the National Weather Service, who spearheaded the model's development. "This is really pushing the frontiers of science."
Although forecasters at the National Hurricane Center in Miami-Dade County have achieved record accuracy in projecting the path of a storm, they still struggle to gauge its power. South Floridians received an unpleasant reminder of this meteorological soft spot in August when Tropical Storm Ernesto was predicted to plow ashore as a hurricane. After thousands of residents scrambled to put up shutters, the system arrived as nothing more than a squally nuisance.
"Often times, the intensity forecasts can be poor, and that's not because forecasters aren't doing the best they can," said John Gamache, field program manager of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Hurricane Research Division in Miami. "It's just that, to an extent, our understanding of the processes within a storm are kind of limited."
Enter the new model, officially called the Hurricane Weather and Research Forecast system, or "H-werf "for short. It will zero in on the ocean's interaction with a storm as never before and produce an elaborate three-dimensional picture of a hurricane's core, where the most vicious winds lurk.
Hopes are that it will outperform older storm intensity models, said Surgi, hurricane modeling program leader at the weather service's Environmental Modeling Center in Camp Springs, Md.
To function, the model needs to gorge on data: sea surface temperatures, wind conditions and barometric pressures, gleaned by hurricane hunter planes, satellites, buoys and other sensors.
After this banquet of information is ingested, it is sifted, studied and manipulated by NOAA's supercomputer in Gaithersburg, Md., which is capable of absorbing 240 million global weather observations daily and doing 14 trillion data operations in a single second.
To give some perspective, if a human were to undertake 14 trillion calculations at the pace of one per second, the job would be complete in 443,632 years.
The H-werf is sure to be a hot topic at the National Hurricane Conference, which starts Monday in New Orleans and helps meteorologists, emergency managers, government officials and others gear up for the coming storm season.
The model already has proven to be a powerful forecasting tool. While being tested, it accurately predicted that Hurricane Katrina would spin into a Category 5 monster as it marched across the Gulf of Mexico toward New Orleans in August 2005. It did "a really good job" tracking other major hurricanes that summer, including Dennis, Rita and Wilma, Surgi said.
Nevertheless, it will take a few seasons for forecasters to gain confidence in the new model, she said. While it should produce positive results this year, it will require annual adjustments and upgrades before it becomes a truly reliable prophet of a hurricane's development.
"We will see an accelerated rate of improvement over the next five to 10 years," she said.
NOAA, the parent agency of both the weather service and the hurricane center, has made intensity forecasting a top priority because the Atlantic basin is entrenched in a period of heightened activity. That was clearly seen in 2005, the most destructive and active season since records began in 1851.
The fear is that more hyperactive seasons may lie ahead, and that off-target intensity predictions could lead to disaster. Yet, try as they might, forecasters have so far been unable to grasp the complex mechanisms that influence storm strength. As a result, the hurricane center last year erred by an average of 21 mph in predicting the sustained winds of storms three days in advance. That wasn't much better than the average error a decade and a half ago.
The most dreaded scenario for forecasters and emergency managers alike is for a system to rapidly intensify just prior to landfall, as Charley did in August 2004. In five hours, the system's sustained winds surged from 110 to 150 mph, from Category 2 to Category 4, before battering Punta Gorda, Port Charlotte and other Southwest Florida towns.
The reason Charley bulked up so quickly: It crossed over a patch of unusually warm water near the coast and feasted greedily on the thermal energy. Forecasters hadn't expected that. And, in general, they have difficulty foreseeing when a storm will suddenly spin up, said Nick Shay, of the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.
"Rapid intensification happens in only 10 to 15 percent of the systems," he said. "But those are the ones that give forecasters fits."
In its proposed $3.8 billion budget for next year, NOAA has requested $2 million specifically for hurricane intensity research. It has amassed an arsenal of technological tools to sample the atmosphere around hurricanes, including a high-flying Gulfstream jet equipped with Doppler radar. And it has conducted in-depth post-mortem studies of storms. For instance, during the 2006 storm season, it examined the entire lifecycle of some tropical systems to determine what makes them fluctuate in strength.
But the real optimism for progress lies with the new model, officials said. Although it is "one piece of the puzzle" in the hurricane center's ongoing campaign to improve forecast accuracy, it is a key one, said hurricane specialist James Franklin.
"That is our hope for the future," he said.
TROPICAL STORM CONDITIONS POSSIBLE MONDAY OR TUESDAY FOR THE
MARIANA ISLANDS...
A TROPICAL DEPRESSION WEST OF POHNPEI IS EXPECTED TO DEVELOP AND
MOVE NORTHWEST TOWARD THE MARIANA ISLANDS...POSSIBLY BRINGING
TROPICAL STORM CONDITIONS TO THE REGION LATE MONDAY OR TUESDAY.
AT 4 PM LST...THE BROAD CENTER OF THE DISTURBANCE WAS LOCATED NEAR
LATITUDE 7.2 DEGREES NORTH AND LONGITUDE 156.0 DEGREES EAST. THIS IS
ABOUT 150 MILES WEST OF POHNPEI...875 MILES EAST-SOUTHEAST OF GUAM
AND 885 MILES SOUTHEAST OF SAIPAN.
IT IS TOO EARLY YET TO SAY EXACTLY WHERE THIS DEVELOPING DISTURBANCE
WILL GO AND HOW QUICKLY IT WILL INTENSIFY...BUT HEAVY RAIN AND
TROPICAL STORM FORCE WINDS IN EXCESS OF 40 MPH ARE POSSIBLE BY LATE
MONDAY OR TUESDAY AS THE SYSTEM APPROACHES AND PASSES THE MARIANAS.
REVIEW YOUR STORM PREPAREDNESS PLANS NOW AND PREPARE TO TAKE NEEDED
STEPS TO PROTECT LIFE AND PROPERTY IF A WATCH OR WARNING IS ISSUED.
STAY INFORMED ON THIS EARLY SEASON TROPICAL CYCLONE THREAT BY
MONITORING THE LATEST FORECASTS AND STATEMENTS FROM THE NATIONAL
WEATHER SERVICE.
I have to agree, without even looking at any "official" data; that structure is too symetrical and organized for even a cat 2.
Sure hope it recurves and stays out to sea.
It gorges on data? But isn't that vital satellite due to fail at any moment, with no replacement even envisioned?
Is this bass-awkward planning, or what?
Sheesh.
Morning, all.
Formation for TD 92W to develop into a TS is GOOD
Forcast at this time to reach category 1 intensity in a few days and threaten the guam area.
What is the earliest we have seen a northern hemisphere typhoon/hurricane?
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