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.

Based on the last few runs of the NAM it appears there is a chance of severe weather in the southern half if Minnesota into Wisconsin tomorrow, June 6. Below are several maps showing how there is plenty of CAPE, little or no CINH, plenty of EHI, 700mb temps of 10c or less, etc. There is also a sufficient amount of helicity and shear currently depicted. However, while there should be plenty of speed shear with this setup the directional shear may be a bit lacking for supercells/tornadoes when looking at whats being depicted in hodographs for the area. Something to keep an eye on.

Right now we plan to chase somewhere in the Mankato area as it appears to be the area (based on the 12z NAM) where things really come together. Even the directional shear is slightly better in this area. We will see what the morning short range models look like though. The NAM right now breaks out no precip in the area. Something I’m not extremely concerned with at this point but I fear there may be some capping issues at the 850mb level.

We initially started out near Litchfield, MN. As storms started to fire in the area we followed one as it crossed I-94 but it was evident this storm was having some capping issues. Eventually it started to look like it was breaking the cap and was dropping some .75 to 1 inch diameter hail in our area (the pic below you can see a piece of .75 inch hail but there was some bigger ones I just didn’t get pics of for some reason). That storm didn’t last long and we headed south to catch the storm near St Cloud which also had broken the cap and was in an area of better EHI, etc.

The storm northeast of St Cloud had a pretty nice meso and some nice structure but seemed pretty outflow dominant also (we were south of the meso and winds were blowing away from the storm and not toward it). We managed to see a brief needle funnel though with the storm a short time before it became tornado warned. All in all a fun little fairly local chase…

Looks like things are going to really start picking up as far as severe weather goes at the end of March and the first part of April. It will be interesting how far north this severe weather occurs as it may be our first opportunity to do some storm chasing. In any case though, the overall pattern is looking very favorable for severe weather so its something we will be keeping a close eye on.