Storm chasers ride out EF-4 wedge tornado

It's not everyday you can tell your friends and family you rode out an EF-4 tornado and lived to tell about it. It's even rarer to do it in a vehicle.

But when that vehicle is specifically geared to intercept said tornadoes, it comes with the territory. But even this monster twister would make the bravest of chasers wonder what could possess someone to ride out this big of a tornado.

Sean Casey and TIV2 before (credit Herb Stein)

If you're a fan of the Discovery Channel show "Storm Chasers" you've no doubt heard about Sean Casey and his quest to film an IMAX movie from INSIDE a tornado. His now-infamous "Tornado Intercept Vehicle", or TIV for short, was designed for such a task. And last Monday, it was put to the ultimate test, as an EF-4 tornado came bearing down upon them and passed over their location in Smith County, KS. It was captured on video by his tag-team partner Brandon Ivey.

His 2nd generation vehicle, the 10-wheeled monolithic TIV2, was bigger, tougher, and heavier than its predecessor TIV1, and in my opinion had they been in TIV1, would not have fared as well. TIV2 is over 14,000 lbs, has bulletproof glass composed of polycarbonate sheets combined with tempered glass on the outside, and thick metal shielding around the entire frame that can withstand micro-sized missiles from penetrating the inside of the vehicle. It also has several rods that ram into the ground in order to anchor the TIV2 and prevent the high winds from moving the vehicle. The 1/8th inch-thick metal shielding extends to the ground, to allow air to pass over the TIV, preventing the wind from going underneath the TIV2 and sending it airborne.

The tornado that was captured provided some dramatic images, from a 1000-lb bale of hay passing from the rear, to metallic objects striking the windshield and creating sparks.

You can watch the video here (high-res version here), and note the sound is fluttery during the most intense part of the pass. If you look at the bottom of the polycarbonate windscreen, you'll note the vibrations are in sync with the fluttery sounds coming through the microphone, as the pressure around the vehicle is dropping and fluctuating as the twister passed over the TIV2.

It's currently unknown how fast the winds were, because their anemometer snapped off when sheet metal debris from a farm a half-mile away hit it, registering wind speeds of 150-174 MPH at the time. These winds speeds register as an EF3 to an EF-4 on NOAA's enhanced Fujita Scale.

Fortunately no deaths occurred with this tornado, but a couple of houses were damaged or destroyed and some cattle are reported missing. They didn't fly by the TIV2, however.

The TIV2 did its job but not without some mishaps. A couple of hatch doors blew open during the intercept and debris entered the TIV2 cabin. The IMAX mount also became dislodged and Sean had to take cover while filming. But, any intercept you can walk away from is a good intercept, no? Before and after pics of the TIV2 can be seen at Sean Casey's Facebook page.

You can track various stormchasers as they go after storms during severe weather season with the Discovery Channel's storm tracker page. Unfortunately Discovery Channel cancelled the show despite decent ratings and a lot of great drama footage of the tornadoes in action. I'm almost certain fellow tracker/TIV copycat Reed Timmer is screaming at the top of his lungs for not being the one to encounter the tornado congratulating Sean for his historic intercept. And somewhere in that TIV2, I'm sure Matt Hughes was along for the ride as well, RIP.

Stay safe everyone, and please, please please...DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME, OR ANYWHERE ELSE FOR THAT MATTER!

So this qualifies as a "Civil Defense Message"...

Some people watching KRTV in Great Falls, Montana got a startling message on their TV screens last Monday, as an Emergency Alert System, or EAS alert came on their TV screens and then a deep-sounding voiceover cautioned that "Civil authorities in your area have reported that the bodies of the dead are rising from their graves."

The message advised listeners to tune in to "920AM" and that the TV station they were watching was going to go off the air (after advising viewers to "follow the on-screen instructions").

The KRTV video is below:

KRTV also reports that several stations across the country were also hacked and similar messages were broadcast.

This one was at a TV station in Michigan (garbled audio):

WNMU-TV in Northern Michigan was also affected, and kids watching Barney got a surprise message as well. No video yet that I can find.

At first I thought the National Weather Service's system was hacked and that these messages were broadcast over NOAA weather radio, however it appears that hackers outside the US were able to get into the sites of the stations themselves and then use "default passwords" to get into the EAS equipment and send out the alerts of the undead.

While the whole incident is, at least to some, hilarious, the FCC, however is not showing their sense of humor about the whole brouhaha, even issuing an advisory (.pdf) to all TV stations using the EAS equipment that was the center of the hack to change their passwords immediately.

As more reports of the undead alerts surface, I'll try to post them, and the videos if they arise from the grave.

Troubleshooting WiFi can be tricky...

Don't you hate it when your interwebs goes down? It's been happening to me a lot lately where I would lose all connectivity, yet my cable modem and router both say everything's fine, and I've been racking my brain trying to figure out the source of the problem.

Like many, my first reaction was to call tech support. When I called, I asked if there was an outage in the area, since it seemed as though I was connected to my router but not pulling any web sites, I assumed it was an outage. Having worked tech support for a living, I'm sure my ISP's support was going to love my call.

When I called about a week ago, the tech said he saw a "lot of packet loss" on my cable modem, and there wasn't an outage, so I had the option of having a tech come out or visiting the office and having my modem replaced. My wife was on the cordless phone so I couldn't ask her what time she'd be home to send a tech out, so I chose the latter. 

But after I hung up, I got to thinking more about what might be the lowest common denominator to the problem, and it did occur to me that it was raining when these outages occurred, so I went outside to where the box was connected from the main line to the house and noticed a lot of growth from an untrimmed forsythia bush around the box (along with a spider or three), so, at 10PM at night, after a monsoon, I grab the trimmers and decide to prune the forsythia away from the outside box. My wife had hung up the phone and came out holding the flashlight wondering what the hell I was doing...

Once I completed the pruning, my internet connectivity was back. So I was happy that I might have fixed the problem. But I noticed the issue return last weekend. It had rained briefly but not a lot to make me think there was the same problem as last time.

One of my kids was on the phone and asked if we were having internet problems because her friend was having the same issues. So, I chalked it up to an actual outage and tried again an hour later, and it was fine.

So earlier tonight, it happens yet again. No internet. I was at my ropes end this time. I called tech support on my cell phone (I couldn't use the home phone because my wife was talking to a friend about a rash on Lauren's head) and had to wait 5 minutes for a tech. I ran outside to check the box (it hasn't rained since last Friday) and all was fine. I went downstairs and rebooted the modem and my WiFi router twice. Then, as my wife hung up the phone and asked me what was going on, the tech came on the line and miraculously my internet came back up.

We spent a few minutes with tech support discussing my options, and once again I decide I probably need to swap out the cable modem, so I get off the phone with tech support, then it hits me...the home phone!!!

Now I start to replay all the outages and sure enough, the HOME PHONE was in use every single time. I have bundling through my cable provider for TV, internet, and phone service. My initial instinct was that one service was screwing up another.

I hop back on the phone with tech support and tell them about my discovery. But the tech support guy had one up on me that I hadn't considered, yet should have thought about first. He simply asked "do you have a CORDLESS phone?"...

And that's when it struck me, my 2.4GHz cordless phone was interfering with the 2.4GHz WiFi router I just acquired 3 weeks ago.

It appears that they're on the same channel and when I get a phone call, the cordless phone is transmitting a more powerful signal between the base and handset and simply kills my WiFi.

So I was foiled by my own cordless phone. And I'm left with a decision. Get a different phone, set my WiFi router to a specific channel that may not be covered by the cordless phone, or perhaps ditch the home phone entirely, which we've thought about doing anyway.

But I'm still trying to figure out the "packet loss" from the first call. Lazy tech near the end of his shift perhaps? Or was there was some legitimate issues with the outside box and the forsythias?

To be continued?

EDIT: Changing the wireless channel on the WiFi seems to have done the trick.

Above-Normal Number of Tornadoes Expected in 2012

State College, Pa. -- 21 February 2012 -- AccuWeather.com reports following a near-record number of tornadoes in 2011, an active severe weather season with above-normal tornadoes is expected in 2012.

There were 1,709 tornadoes in 2011, falling short of the record 1,817 tornadoes set in 2004. In comparison, the average number of tornadoes over the past decade is around 1,300.

Last year ranks as the fourth most deadly tornado year ever recorded in the United States.

Read more at the link in the headline or click here.

DASCCON-1 Severe Weather Workshop and Conference

Received the following email:

Greetings from the Dixie Alley Storm Chase Team,

On Saturday July 28th, 2012 at Union University in Jackson, TN... The Dixie Alley Storm Chase Team will be hosting DASCCON-1 Severe Weather Workshop and Conference. The main focus of this event will be educating the general public on how severe weather events impact our communities. There will be two Skywarn spotter training sessions along with a Storm Chaser Car Show, vendor product demonstrations, etc. We will also have two very well known keynote speakers that will share their experiences and insights about severe weather. Our speakers will be...

Chris Chittick (TornadoVideos.net)

Tim Samaras (Twistex)

We are expecting a very large turnout for DASCCON-1 this Summer in Jackson, TN... And we would like to offer you an opportunity to be a part of this year's event. Also, with the tragic news of the death of storm chaser Andy Gabrielson DASCCON-1 will be held in his honor as a tribute to his contributions to the storm chaser community. You will be able to find an event flyer and sponsor registration forms on our website at http://www.dascon-1.dixiechasers.net

Thank you,

Tim McNeill - The Dixie Alley Storm Chase Team

Morristown NWS to get a new radar technology

Several sources are reporting that the National Weather Service office in Morristown and Nashville are set to get new radar installations.

A tornadic vortex signature from the new
dual-polarization radar (credit NOAA)

The next generation of weather radar, called dual-polarization radar, is currently being installed in Nashville, and Morristown by the end of the month.

It's already installed in the Memphis facility and will be able to more accurately tell the meteorologists what type of weather is coming our way, and more importantly, if there's debris on the ground. It can tell the differences between rain, heavy rain, snow, and hail. More info on this new radar can be downloaded here.

A dual-polarization radar scan showing different
types of precipitation in one sweep (credit NOAA)

However, don't think it's a replacement for SKYWARN spotters. They'll still be in use to confirm what the radar is seeing and report from the "fringe areas" where the radar may not be able to determine what's going on because of the terrain (East Tennessee is in the mountains after all) or in the rare event that the radar gets knocked offline. I've been on the air calling a SKYWARN net when Morristown's radar got hit by lightning several years ago, knocking them offline. They were relying on ham radio operators to relay what was going on, as they tried to gauge the severe weather from radar stations in Huntsville, Nashville, and southwest Virginia, where the East Tennessee area was on the very fringe of their radar scans.

So, this is great news for the area I'm in (and it's being installed all across the country), but it's also a time to remember that, in the possible event of a catastrophic failure ham radio operators will still be around to report on the weather "when all else fails".

It pays to check your ground!

The last few months I've seen some strange things amiss at my house that are out of the ordinary. I lost some electronics to lightning in April. My computer, a couple of wifi routers, cable modems from my ISP, and possibly a couple of appliances in the kitchen all became victims of lightning. Not a direct hit, but, as I have had occur before, static from a nearby strike ran in and toasted the stuff.

I suspected I had an issue with my ground system, but wasn't sure the best way to deal with it. I talked with one ham on the radio about it and he said it was imperative that I check my grounding system. But things seemed fine with my electronics and as a precaution I began unplugging most of the sensitive electronics such as my TV, ham equipment, and cable equipment.

After my TV went out last month (due to what was eventually an unrelated issue) I called my friend Jason (KF4VDX) and he showed up the week before Christmas to check things out. My wiring in the house was fine and we changed out a breaker for the living room as it was needed anyway. Then we looked at the ground rod and discovered that the clamp to the rod was completely eroded and my ground rod and ground wire were BARELY touching!!!

The weather forecast called for thunderstorms the next day, and it was 10 o'clock at night when we discovered this, so the hardware stores were closed and I had no clamps here, so we ran to Walmart and looked for something...ANYTHING that would work in a fix. We settled on an automobile battery clamp and got the grounding issue settled. The next day I went to the hardware store and bought TWO ground clamps to ensure this would not happen again. Unfortunately with the rain (it was near constant the next several days) I couldn't get to it safely until the day after Christmas when I got back from a trip to the zoo with the family.

While I was at it, I took the wiring from my antenna and secured it to the electrical ground as well. Up until then I had it secured to a different ground rod. I was encouraged to put them on the same ground.

So life lesson learned. Sometimes, when I try to be a better ham, some of the most basic things are overlooked.

Rocky Beckner, K8DRB/ex WD8SBO SK

One of the main reasons I got seriously involved in ham radio was the aspect of emergency communications and community service that comes along with it. When I first got licensed I was doing bike races, 5k runs, and marathons for local track clubs.

Every Spring, the weather in East Tennessee can be some of the most complex in the country. One minute it's hot and sunny, the next it's cold and rainy. The thunderstorms in the region can rival a hot, muggy day in Tampa (the self-proclaimed "lightning capital of the world") and the occasional spurring of a tornado can make you think you're smack in the middle of "Tornado Alley" in the midwest.

I can recall a time when, as the weather got severe in these parts, there wouldn't be a SKYWARN net, just a gaggle of hams discussing what the weather's doing in their neck of the woods, or even better, "it ain't doin' nuthin' over here,"with subsequent discussion on their latest visit to the doctor...

Back in the early to mid-90's, that was the norm for these parts. It was especially frustrating for me, because I would often get in my '91 Chevy S-10 pickup truck and stupidly bravely chase these storms, and to not have a bona-fide way to report to the National Weather Service my observations (remember, this was before everyone and their mom had a cell phone). 

Then, along came Rocky Beckner.

He was living in Morristown at the time, having come down from his home state of Michigan, where he had helped with SKYWARN up there to get ham radio a permanent presence in the local weather office up there.

Whatever the reason he ended up here in East Tennessee (I've since forgotten) he made it a mission to get a ham station set up at the Morristown office. It wasn't just him, but he was a driving force in getting it done.

WX4MRX, circa 2000

The hamshack at the weather service was officially started in 1998. He was operating at the weather service about a year or two prior, often with his own equipment. The Lakeway Amateur Radio Club contributed some money and equipment and a government grant was given to the weather service office to secure the radios and cabling. Soon, Rocky was able to run a pretty slick operation from inside the weather service office. 

The station's initial callsign was initially KF4EKQ, which was quickly changed over to WX4MRX within a few weeks. 

Early on in the project, around 1994, Rocky came to know me well, and apparently so did some of the meteorologists who worked up there at the time. I can't count the number of times he would chastise me on the air (or off) for chasing these storms in these parts, sometimes at night, with little/no knowledge of weather myself. He couldn't STAND it when I was operating "stormchaser mobile". I do admit I was so full of piss & vinegar I didn't care what he (or any meteorologist) thought, I was having fun and doing daredevil stuff years which I'd been doing YEARS before "Twister" hit movie theaters (and blasphemed stormchasers everywhere in my opinion).

The current setup at WX4MRX

Then on May 18, 1995, there was an outbreak across the area that was part of a larger outbreak across Tennessee. This event changed how I respected weather and what I felt my "calling" was in ham radio. It had already been an active day weather-wise, and I was attending a RACK meeting but took my radio in and had it on the then-wide area repeater on English Mountain. Barely 15 minutes into the meeting I heard the then-used EBS tone and the announcement that a tornado warning had been issued for Anderson County, to the west of Knoxville. I stood up and let everyone in the meeting know, then booked it to the "chase vehicle". I headed north on I-75 towards Raccoon Valley Road, and I saw the cell that spawned the warning, but if there was a tornado, it was wrapped in rain. As I approached the Raccoon Valley Road exit, a golf-ball sized hailstone hit my windshield. It didn't crack, but I took the hint to get the hell off the road, because I was on a stretch of Interstate with no way of turning around, and little options if all hail broke loose. I quickly got off the Interstate at the exit and found shelter under a gas station awning right as the hailstorm hit. Baseball and softball sized ice rained down overhead, and fortunately the awning sheltered me. At one point I did hear the distinct "freight train" cliched noise, but never saw the tornado, nor did I see signs of it doing damage, so it may have only been a funnel cloud.

I drove home, at the time living in north Knoxville, and got my Radio Shack HTX-202 on a local repeater. All I heard was a bunch of hams hollering that there "wasn't a net" and yet no one seemed to want to take the reigns and do something about it. So I grabbed a pen and some paper and started calling one. I'd had some net control experience with some area ragchew nets and tech nets, but this was going to be a new experience. Overall I did as well as I could, before a tornado touched down about 1/4 mile from my house and knocked out power and caused some pandemonium in my neighborhood.

I learned a lot that night, that I was much better at calling a weather net rather than trying to chase the damned things. Rocky wasn't aware of the net because we weren't on the normal repeater where we'd hear the him transmitting from. But he'd heard about it, and soon after I started finding out more about SKYWARN and studying more about weather, tornadoes, wind, hail, and flooding.

Once Rocky and friends (not sure about Moose and Squirrel) got the hamshack in full operation it was not uncommon to hear him at all hours, any given day of the week, whenever the weather went bad.

We became well acquainted as fellow net control stations and he warmed up to me as a Net Control more than as a very amateur stormchaser, and he even invited me to operate WX4MRX at the NWS office following a lengthy rainstorm that caused major flooding in the area. When he left to go back home to Michigan due to his health, I knew I'd never see him again, unless we both ended up checking out the Hamvention in Dayton, which never happened.  We'd email each other every so often, and he gave me some words of encouragement (albeit brief, but his emails were not much on content) when there was a "meltdown" in 2006 that forced me out of SKYWARN for a couple of years.

I'd send an occasional email to him about things going on down here, but he wouldn't respond much, if at all. I knew his health was not the best, so I thought nothing of it. Then, last weekend while at the the weather service during SKYWARN Recognition Day, another ham who was there gave me the news that he'd passed away "a year or two ago", which shocked me. I figured someone would have told me. I guess I got that far out of the loop to get that bit of info...

He was a pioneer in SKYWARN getting the recognition it deserved with regards to the contribution of ham radio and how it could benefit the weather service here in East Tennessee. He was dedicated to both the hams and the meteorologists and these days I think few hams here truly realize or appreciate what he brought to the table.

He was not one to mince words with you, and would often tell you exactly what he thought. If you were wasting precious time asking him questions irrelevant to the weather situation, he had no reservations about letting you know it. Being diplomatic was not always in his repertoire, but then again, as he often told me, SKYWARN nets are not the time to win friends and influence people. 

I for one have missed his dedication, often being at the weather service pretty much 24/7, sometimes struggling with the health problems that eventually drove him back home to Michigan. While his presence has been replaced, he will not be forgotten by those of us who remember the times prior to WX4MRX being on the air. Ham radio has made weather spotting in this area more complete and has helped to bridge a needed gap in what the radar "sees" and what is on the ground. Rocky was a crucial part of that in its infancy. He will be missed.

6500

That's the number of cell towers that lost power or were damaged during Hurricane Irene.  44% of cell towers in Vermont alone were knocked out.

210,000 wired customers were out of service as of Monday afternoon, and 2 TV stations and 10 radio stations were also knocked off the air.

Meanwhile, ham radio's still chugging along for many in the northeast. Thoughts of amateur radio's decline and "ancient" form of communications continues to shine through despite the conveniences of modern technology, which isn't convenient when a natural disaster such as Hurricane Irene takes out the resources needed to communicate.

Oklahoma ham loses radio equipment, home to wildfire

Harold Lazear (K5KLM) of Terlton, OK saw the flames coming and hopped on the roof of his home with a hose to try and do whatever he could to fight the inferno from taking his home and its treasure trove of ham equipment he'd collected over the years.

In the end, the fire won the battle.

The flames approached so fast that when Lazear realized he was not going to be able to hold off the fire, he only had time to jump in his pickup and leave without collecting any radio equipment. It all burned to the ground in 10 minutes.

After building up a collection over the years as a storm spotter and Red Cross volunteer, he now finds himself a recipient of aid from the agency he dedicated his volunteer time towards.

People who wish to donate may do so with a credit card at the Red Cross website, tulsaworld.com/okredcross, or by calling 918-831-1170. Checks can be mailed to American Red Cross-Tulsa Area Chapter, Dept. 995, Tulsa, OK 74182. Make checks payable to American Red Cross-Tulsa Area Chapter.

STS-135 launch (and spaceflight thoughts)

The week of the 4th of July I was in Florida visiting family and looking to attempt to watch Atlantis lift off from the Cape on the final Shuttle flight.

Two things:

1) I will NEVER drive through Orlando ever again if I can help it, and

2) It's sad that we will never have this opportunity to see such awesomeness ever again.

We were staying in Daytona Beach for a couple of days (we didn't dare try Cocoa Beach or Titusville) and I took the family down as well as my mother. We went mainly because she'd never seen a launch and wanted to catch it before NASA ended the shuttle program. Ironically, the day of the launch she felt ill and didn't want to make the trip down from Daytona. We arrived from Ft. Myers the day before and were pretty exhausted from the drive after suffering through Orlando during rush hour with a monsoonal rain to add to the misery. Two hours and 3 "alternate routes" through Orlando, and we arrived in Daytona about ready to stay without making an attempt to go to the Cape area.

And to boot, it was questionable whether they'd launch because of weather. a 30% chance of a launch was not good odds, but something told me that, with close to a million people watching around the space coast, I began to wonder if they'd forego some restrictions in order to finish up the program. With the shuttle program already a year behind on its scheduled shutdown, I thought for certain that they would be under pressure to finish while maintaining an acceptable limit of safety. After all, the last two times that NASA got complacent we lost two shuttles and 14 astronauts.

I didn't decide to make the trek south until about 2 hours until liftoff. We got on the road south on I-95 and I took an exit just north of Titusville. My plan was to simply get on the outskirts of the crowds, yet stay close enough to actually see the liftoff.

We rode US 1 to the Titusville city limit and checked the GPS for any nearby parks. But on the way we started seeing cars on the side of the road, so we figured the park was jammed.

As I turned around and went north, I spotted a parking lot near the hospital that was occupied with people watching the launch, but looked to have a few spaces left. When we got parked we had 30 minutes before liftoff. We walked around the area and then got back to the car and set up the camera.

As we got closer to the T-0, we could feel the anticipation grow. Then at 31 seconds, there was a halt due to a problem with the fuel arm that loads the liquid propellants into the external tank. We thought that was going to blow the launch for the day, but they were able to quickly resume the count after confirming that the arm was fully retracted. When the count hit zero, we waited for about 8-10 seconds before we saw it rise from the treeline and head into space.

Unfortunately the low clouds made it viewable for only 10-15 seconds before we lost it to cloud cover. We were a lot closer to the launch site than I thought, as we were looking towards an area further south than we actually were. The shuttle appeared further to our east and closer than I imagined. I had my video camera pointed to the southeast, but when I grabbed it to look east, I bumped the on/off button for the recording. When I looked at it later, all you see is a still shot of the view southeast, then a cut to the smoke trail heading off into the clouds. Fortunately my brother loaned us his digital camera as well as the video camera, so I managed to get off one good shot before it got into the clouds.

Almost immediately I grabbed the tripod and equipment and got into the car, the delayed sound of the shuttles SRBs roaring to life wafting over the crowd as we quickly made our way back to Daytona Beach. We got back to our room before 1PM. After being stuck in Orlando traffic, I was glad we didn't need to suffer through space coast traffic the day after.

As we drove back to Daytona, I then had the time to really ponder what we had witnessed and the impact on our future as a space power.

I'm not wanting to drag politics into the post, but you have to wonder why, after we built the majority of the International Space Station, and we footed most of the billions needed to put it in orbit, we now have to hitchhike with our partners in Russia, and then shell out millions for the rides. I'm curious how much money Russia paid NASA in order to ferry some of their cosmonauts on the shuttle.

Still, $56 million per person is a lot cheaper than what it would cost to launch another shuttle.

The reality is that the Space Shuttle, while cool, and an amazing display of American ingenuity technology and power, is almost 40 years old. It boggles my mind how stagnant the manned spaceflight program has been. In roughly 15 years, we went from Mercury, to Gemini, Apollo, then the Shuttle. Mercury was started in 1959. The shuttle program's origins go back to around 1969 as we landed on the moon. But from there, we have not launched anything other than the shuttles since 1981.

The shuttle was designed to make spaceflight "normal", and cheaper, more efficient, and almost as commonplace as getting on an airplane and flying from New York to London. And while the shuttle has made spaceflight a more achievable plateau than it was in the 60's, we have a long way to go before it's a mode of transportation that is as commonplace as air travel.

With the manned spaceflight program in full gear in the 60's to get to the moon, it would have appeared the the Space Shuttle was going to follow the same route, with Columbia being a "Generation 1" shuttle, and later shuttles being bigger, more advanced, and in some ways cosmetically different from one another. Other than subtle technology advances that made OV-105 (Endeavour) lighter than OV-102 (Columbia), there was no real change in the orbiters as far as concept, aerodynamic shape, etc.

I was hoping by now we'd have a shuttle with something like 9 main engines, a double-wide cargo bay, launched on a stack with 6 SRBs and a huge external tank 3x the size of the one the current fleet used. We never got to that point. I am sure THAT would have been impressive...

So now where does manned spaceflight go? We have a space station we can't get to, unless we hitch a ride with the Russians, and the only sign we're going to get back to a domestic manned program is either private industries like SpaceX or Congress appropriating more money towards the ARES program, using capsules to get into orbit rather than shuttles. And capsules seems rather regressive to me.

The need for SKYWARN

Last month I was heading home and ran into an interesting cloud formation as a powerful wind storm approached Knoxville. Fortunately it was not a tornado, but it was part of a wind storm that did a lot of damage around the area.

Two days later...

The storms that roared through Alabama were some of the largest outbreaks in recent history, with more deaths associated than the famous 1974 "Super Outbreak" in the Ohio Valley.

Check out this video from Tuscaloosa:

The tornado that blew through Tuscaloosa was rated EF-4 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale. Here's the path of that tornado:

Credit Brian Tang and NCAR.

While Tennessee was fortunate to have missed the brunt of this massive tornado, we were no less spared from the tremendous damage inflicted by the storm. 35 people died in Tennessee and 52 tornadoes were confirmed.

I helped man our area SKYWARN net for the first time in many years on a consistent basis. Without going in to too much detail, politics and an ungrateful power-mongering individual with a vendetta on me got in the way of my participating in SKYWARN for 4+ years. However, fate and karma brought me back in (along with many others he alienated) and it has been one heck of a season so far.

Just prior to this outbreak, Knoxville was hammered with flooding and another tornadic storm in recent weeks, the April 27th outbreak was going to put many skills (and nerves) to the ultimate test.

I arrived home Wednesday afternoon and flipped on the Weather Channel to see the monster tornado raging through Birmingham live. Here's the video off of YouTube.

I'd been keeping a mindful eye on the weather most of the day as best I could while at work. When I got home, and saw what was going on in Alabama, I knew we were in for a long night. As I was watching the storms develop, my weather radio went off with one of many warnings to occur that evening. I counted a total of 49 tornado warnings issued by the Morristown National Weather Service for Knoxville and surrounding counties alone.

While Knoxville didn't get tornadoes, we did get hail. Lots of it. Quarter sized hail bombarded parts of west Knoxville and the SKYWARN net I was running at the time was hammered with repeated reports from there. I finally had to tell everyone on the net to stop with the reports from the same area and give me reports from areas east of there so I could tell where the line was...and prepare for the storm to hit my house, mere minutes away. I passed the net control "baton" to another ham and got ready.

My ham station was in the lower part of my house, so I got the kids and animals downstairs and waited for the inevitable. Within 5 minutes of hearing that the quarter-sized hail was in west Knoxville, it was at my home.

Fortunately the brunt of the hail passed south of me, and I only got nickel-sized hail. But it made the tension no less extreme as the storm progressed towards the northeast. The storm would drop an EF-4 tornado down in nearby Greeneville, killing 7 there.

As the night wore on, more and more reports of damage, high winds, hail, wall clouds, and funnel clouds came in. Several tornadoes touched down all over the area, including a bad one in the Chattanooga area.

The Alabama tornadoes, especially Tuscaloosa, overshadowed the death and destruction elsewhere, but the one constant through all of this was the use of SKYWARN spotters all across the southeast.

One of the many great assets of ham radio is the cooperation that the National Weather Service has with ham radio SKYWARN spotters. While anyone can be a SKYWARN spotter (first responders, police, fire, medical, etc) ham radio is typically the only service that has a station (and a volunteer) on site at the weather service.

The more eyes on the storm, the better. The more eyes that become hams, then the communities are a little more safe.

WWV discontinuing solar activity alerts

Via the ARRL:

Beginning Tuesday, September 6, the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) will cease broadcasting its geophysical alert message on WWV and WWVH. These messages inform listeners of the solar flux, the mid-latitude A and K indices and space weather storms, both current and predicted. Currently, the message is heard on minute 18 from WWV and minute 45 from WWVH. The information will still be available on the SWPC website. If you care to comment on this, or if you have any questions, the SPWC -- part of the National Weather Service (NWS) -- would like to hear from you.

Stormchase 4/25/11

On my way home tonight I ran into a severe thunderstorm moving in from the south. As I continued to watch it develop the winds really kicked up and I observed the formation in the video below (WARNING - turn volume down, the wind was blasting the mic of my cell phone):



The formation did not rotate, but it did have an updraft (you might see it in the closeup at the 31 second mark) which made it very hard to judge what I was watching for a few moments.

It was a few tense moments, but it did not turn cyclonic.

Just after I stopped filming the hail started, fortunately no bigger than pea-sized.