MajorLeagueStorms.com – Storm Chasing & Weather Blog

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Yesterday, a reporter posted on the Fox News blog asking if we really need the National Weather Service and suggested weather forecasts, warnings, etc could be and should be handled by the private sector. This blog post could not have been written at a worse time if you agree with this person (which I don’t). In the following article I will address the reason why the private sector should never be in charge of the things the National Weather Service does.

Hurricane Irene will go down in history. Not because of the destruction that it caused or the loss of life that occurred. Instead, it will go down as one of the most over-hyped storms ever to occur. All of the news agencies are guilty of this – from The Weather Channel to Fox News to CNN and CNBC. They all warned of the catastrophic conditions that would (not could) occur. It’s no coincidence that the level of media attention for this storm had in large part to do with the part of the Country the storm was going to affect – the northeast which is where the majority of the US population lives. But why all the hype?

September 11th was one of the worst and most tragic days in US history. It changed us as Americans. It also changed the media. In my opinion anyhow, this is when the media realized how profitable a tragedy could be. It seems since this day, they have been looking for – almost wishing for the ‘next big tragedy’. They got their wish with Hurricane Katrina in 2005. However, since then we have almost gone through a ‘dry spell’ of catastrophic events – at least until this year with the large number of tornadoes going through large cities and causing enormous damage and tragically many deaths. The bottom line is these media agencies don’t honestly care if people are warned of things (at least to a very large extent they don’t care). They don’t care if what they say or do will save your lives (again, for the most part). No, sadly what they ultimately care about are ratings. Ratings which help them earn money. This is why the private sector can not replace the National Weather Service.

What these news agencies may not realize (or maybe simply don’t care) is what they are doing when they over-hype storms is ‘breeding’ a generation of people who will simply start ignoring warnings and think the media is simply blowing things out of proportion again. The day will come where people will no longer heed the warnings when they should have (something that is already a problem). It could happen tomorrow – and it could have dire consequences.

Here are some of the lightning shots I got from 8-22-11 by Mankato, MN.

Here is an image of the tornado we saw (from a distance) west of Morris, MN on July 30, 2011.

Ended up targeting Huron, SD for our chase as it was right on Highway 14 (which made it easy to get to) and I felt it would be fairly close to where the low/warm front would be and where initation would occur. As it turns out, our positioning was fairly good. Unfortunately aside from the northern most storms most of the storms went linear fairly quickly with embedded supercells. We still managed to see several wall clouds and at least 2 separate funnel clouds. Despite our reports though no tornado warning was issued for our storm (oh well I guess – probably partly because the storm had a shelf cloud on it but at times things would transition to a wall cloud). Anyhow, pretty fun chase and some pretty cool storm structure.

Here are the pics of the funnel clouds we saw:

We ended up heading up north of Willmar, MN to get on the elevated convection up there as we were hoping it would move south/southeast and become more surface based as it moved into a more favorable environment. Unfortunately this didn’t happen and a cloud deck that formed in southwest MN really messed things up. We ended up bailing on the setup around 6:30PM and started heading back home to Mankato. Literally about 5 minutes after I dropped off the person I was chasing with I noticed things firing down by St James. We decided we would go for it so we headed down 169 out of Mankato and then turned south towards Vernon Center, MN (on 169) as a storm just east of the storm by St James was starting to get better organized. We ended up seeing 3 wall clouds with this storm (with some rotation) which we reported. I also ‘believe’ we may have seen at least one funnel cloud and possibly a weak tornado but didn’t report these as I couldn’t see any rotation (it was getting dark). Video of these features are below. The white feature is particularly interesting – it looks like a tornado for a bit but then looks extremely ragged so I’m not sure if it was or not (plus trees are obstructing our view a bit so I’m not sure if it was even on the ground). Left of the white feature I’m pretty sure there is a funnel cloud that comes down but again rotation was hard to make out. Interesting chase though for sure.

Finally got my video uploaded from July 1, 2011 in MN. I ‘believe’ there is a wall cloud at approximately 30 seconds into the video that probably produced the tornado that hit Ruthton, MN.

We started out the day heading west on Highway 14 with a target of Pipestone, MN. Everything came together as our target and timing was almost perfect. As we headed south off of 14 towards Ruthton, MN a large and very powerful storm moved towards us with an amazing shelf cloud and storm structure. Just south of Ruthton the storm impacted us with 80+MPH winds and some small hail (there was larger hail but tried to stay out of the core). Unfortunately this storm did some significant damage in the area. Below is a picture of the shelf cloud. I will be posting video from the day in the coming days.

We ended up running late to the show so we almost missed out. We started in/near Yankton, SD as I thought this would be a good place to move across the Missouri River and knew the storms would be heading more north then anything. As it turns out, this target was just to far north. We shot south as fast as we could and ended up getting a tornado southwest of Columbus, Nebraska. It was only on the ground for a few minutes though before it lifted and the storm started to transition into more of a wind producing storm.