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Weather Banter

When I was reorganizing the area Ham radio Skywarns for the local NWS office where each county ran it's own group, I discovered one inactive county had 5 different "official" Skywarn websites, another had 3, several had 2, and one had 2 groups, both inactive, claiming to run their local program. Only two counties and the Charlotte metro area had active Ham radio Skywarns. The Ham radio side of Skywarn is mostly dormant here now due to politics in the ARRL, and the local NWS now uses social media and untrained observers for their storm reports. I'm told it's much like this in lots of places now. Just another nail in the coffin for Ham radio in the US...
 
Sundown and a mild thunderstorm here. Temperature has dropped about 10f-12f degrees. A nice way to end the weekend :cool:
 
Taken directly from my local NWS Forecaster's discussion today:

"enviroment doesn`t support the development of Twisters.
Main hazards today may feel like hand shaking Zeus"

Non-standard wording and basic grammar errors. So (non) professional :confused:
 
Wasn't sure where else to post this, but a relative of Tom Grazulis is selling a bunch of brand new, unread copies of Significant Tornadoes 1992-1995 on eBay. They are selling for $40 per copy, or $45 for a signed edition, plus about five bucks shipping. These usually sell for $100+, so if you've ever wanted to own a part of Significant Tornadoes but refuse to pay the usual restrictive eBay prices, now is the time to do it.

(FWIW, copies of 1880-1989 and 1680-1991 usually sell for about $150-$300+, so $45 for a signed copy of the 1992-1995 edition is certainly better than nothing!)
 
Sawmaster said:
Taken directly from my local NWS Forecaster's discussion today:

"enviroment doesn`t support the development of Twisters.
Main hazards today may feel like hand shaking Zeus"

Non-standard wording and basic grammar errors. So (non) professional :confused:
Click to expand...

I get the feeling that that's supposed to be a cheeky Twister(s) reference.:p
 
Tennie said:
I get the feeling that that's supposed to be a cheeky Twister(s) reference.:p
Click to expand...
It's still rather unprofessional and a lot of people won't understand it. If they want to do things like that they should limit it to their social media accounts which are not available for direct public viewing unless you have an account yourself. I never got a reply from an email I sent to their PIO regarding that. "Enviroment" is missing a letter and misspelling is commonplace with them. They often use abbreviations which are not listed in the directory of terms and you have to figure out what they mean yourself. It often takes them a few minutes before broadcasted warnings show up on the website when that used to be done in seconds, They are too 'casual' for me and would do well to emulate the much better office to the south. They used to be top-notch but they kind of suck now, hence my rant.
 
The Tornado Archive lives on Windows XP! Thanks to the Mypal browser that is now based on Firefox Quantum, many modern websites can be loaded properly.

It is obviously rather sluggish, and there are some weird visual glitches when scrolling the map, but it is otherwise 100% functional.
tornadoarchive.PNG

(On a related note, as of last month Windows XP has a whopping 82.63% of the desktop OS market share in Armenia. Thank you for keeping this over 20-year old operating system alive.)
 
I finally got to watch Twisters. It is a fun summer popcorn movie if you can suspend your knowledge of tornadoes when you walk in the door.

They do a couple of things very well: show the damage these storms cause to people and property. They also perform a decent job of re-creating storms, and the sound is unbelievably good. That being said, do not go if you cannot leave your meteorology knowledge behind. They were setting out to forget about all the bad stuff in the world and have fun within a two-hour movie, and they succeeded.
 
Speaking of Twister related shenanigans, Trey Greenwood has a fun new video discussing the meteorology of the original movie; still gotta see the sequel



Meanwhile, from drought to flooding here - a little over an inch of rain in the past week but today alone has seen an inch and a half and looks like a good bit more thunderstorm activity is coming... substantial yard flooding for the first time since spring, love to see it
 
Bit of a long story but I'll try to summarize the best I can:

Recently, the original HDD in my 1980s Toshiba T3100e/40 finally bit the dust for good, and the BIOS only supports two hard drive types by default, so I decided to start seeking out a replacement.

The cost of old HDD's on eBay is often absurd, and the type of drive I was looking for (a Conner CP-3044) was no exception, so I went an alternate route - bought a Zenith SuperSport 286e parts machine with the intention of scavenging the HDD from it. Such went as planned, and the Toshiba is back in working order.

The Zenith parts machine is in horrific condition - lots of rust and what appears to be moisture damage on some of the stickers inside (fortunately, the hard drive I needed escaped the same fate). The drive I pulled from it and put in the Toshiba boots to Weatherlink 3.01 - an MS-DOS application released by Davis Instruments in 1994. Perhaps that gives some clues to how the Zenith laptop ended up in such bad condition. Anyways, from what I understand, the weather stations of that time communicated with the software using a proprietary wireless dongle connected to the computer's serial port. Pretty fascinating stuff. Davis is still around, but their current stations would have no chance of working with this old software, obviously.

Now if only I could find one of those old Davis stations and the dongle that goes with it - not gonna lie, seeing a 30 year old piece of software being run on a nearly 40 year old laptop collect present day weather data would be a pretty cool thing to see. Some things really never change in the technology world...
 
I saw a news report that evacuation of parts of Tokyo has been called because of that slow-moving tropical system that landed as a typhoon packing winds in the 150s mph on southern Kyushu days ago and only now is approaching Tokyo as a tropical storm.

I don't know about that but do have the Tokyo emergency alert page (autotranslated) saved because of the recent megaquake alert, if anyone wants to check things out.

It's not intuitive for this Westerner but I do see lots of landslide warnings at the moment.

The news story also mentions that three rivers there are under warnings.

PS: This might be helpful, too; it seems to have links for ALL the warnings and watches (autotranslated).

PPS: Their current warnings graphic (autotranslated):

screenshot_20240830-093937_firefox-focus.jpg
 
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Had a Severe warned T-storm roll through an hour go but hardly any wind here though the inch or so of rain was very welcome, hopefully in time to save my neighbor's summer sweet corn crop which was looking bad. We'll see how it responds in a couple days. Temps dropped nicely from sweating to fall-like. Same forecast for tomorrow.

And to top it off just now 15 feet outside of my window there was a bald eagle jumping from bush to fence to shed roof and back. Haven't seen one of them around here in years. What a nice evening:)
 
It's really bad. Also, Dave Petley tweeted an hour ago that there had been a major dam failure in Poland, with another reservoir located downstream.

 
Saw something unusual today... A ghostly purple...pillar reaching to the cloud before it became a lightning bolt. Maybe a leader, but I thought those only lasted a matter of milliseconds. This was long enough for me to turn my head after I caught it out of the corner of my eye.
 
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