a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by am_Unition

Perhaps the biggest predicted tornado outbreak of 2019 today. Be sure to check the twitter feed if you can, especially after about 1800 UTC (3:00 PM CDT) and get the word out to people and/or organizations in the path of anything that looks menacing. We're living in a golden(?) age where social media and engagement of strangers online can save lives. Be that strange.

I'm just glad to see that this outbreak is predicted to negatively impact an especially small amount of human life and has a lot of potential to yield some great data!





am_Unition  ·  1793 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Update:

For whatever reason, the forecast turned out to be quite a dud. The storms mostly formed up into a line stretching from southwest to northeast, which disrupts the ability of each cell to ingest a laminar/undisturbed inflow, a very necessary ingredient to spawn tornadoes. There were only one or two supercells that produced confirmed tornadoes on the ground in the "high risk" forecast area, which led to traffic jams of storm chasers converging in the middle of nowhere:

This is going to become an increasingly serious problem. Eventually, we'll have a situation where chasers experience mass casualties after trapping themselves in the path of a tornado that's changed its path unpredictably. Something way worse than El Reno (four chaser fatalities, and three of them on a science team). I can't find the tweet, but one of the scientists trying to deploy equipment to study tornadoes complained yesterday that the hobbyists and companies offering tornado chasing tours completely impeded their ability to do science. Even worse, the traffic impedes emergency response crews from saving lives. I consider myself a fun guy who respects civil rights, but we might need to begin issuing storm chasing permits or something(?) that we prioritize to scientists, select companies, and trained spotters. Maybe give cops permission to pull over out-of-state license plates with multiple people in the car, and if they find a smattering of cameras and tripods, boom, that's a ticket. I dunno. It's a tricky problem to fix, but it's time to begin a policy-oriented conversation about it.

Devac  ·  1793 days ago  ·  link  ·  

They moved here, obviously.

The times we live int.

    and companies offering tornado chasing tours

I still can't believe those are real. The closest I came to seeing a tornado was a funnel cloud five years ago and that's probably the most scared, flight-flight-FLIGHT I ever got. People paying to see those things from up close blow my mind.

am_Unition  ·  1791 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It's on my bucket list.

8-year-old me got a spanking after riding my bike up the road to intercept an incoming thunderstorm. I have an instinctual attraction to this crap, which makes me no better than my cat, who routinely seeks out things to eat that will make him vomit later.

Edit: also I wish I coulda read your reply in that other thread, sorry, this week started innocuously enough and then got hella busy.