Notes From the National Severe Weather Workshop

This week, I have been at the National Severe Weather Workshop in Norman, Oklahoma. This is the tenth year of the annual event that brings together representatives of the National Weather Service, emergency management, academia and the media in order to improve the severe weather enterprise. Here are a few notes from the conference…

The Director of Emergency Management from Wal-Mart was very interesting. They have a highly developed weather monitoring and disaster response system, including custom software that is tied to the NWS Forecast Database. This system alerts them instantly when adverse weather is going to affect their stores. They also have a fleet of 30 generator trucks on the ready when major storms impact an area. When stores are in NWS Storm Based Warnings, the stores receive an automatic call from their system. He talked about the tornado that hit their Prattville store last spring, partially unroofing it. There was a tornado warning in effect 44 minutes before the tornado hit. Ironically, 44 minutes of lead time is too long when you are asking customers and associates not to leave the store.

The Director of Business Continuity for State Farm Insurance gave an interesting fact during his talk. Sending the 10,000 employees in their Bloomington, Illinois headquarters costs the company $1 million per hour. He also showed amazing surveillance video of when a tornado hit their Greeley, Colorado regional office on a Thursday afternoon last year. Their business continuity plans had the office back up and running the following Monday, despite heavy damage, and the fact that every single employee’s car in the parking lot was destroyed. Good planning in advance paid off.

Jim LaDue of the Warning Decision Training Branch had a fascinating interactive talk on rating the damage caused by tornadoes using the new Enhanced Fujita Scale. One interesting point was that damage indicators for some items only go up so far. For example, for a mobile home, the top damage indicator is EF2, which destroys a mobile home.

Josh Wurman, of Doppler on Wheels Fame, gave a superb talk on extrapolating low level Mobile Doppler wind measurements to ground level. He has been able to compare he Doppler readings with in situ measurements from probes, sticknets and Sean Casey’s TIV. Winds at 3 meters are generally 70-90% of the 18 meter speeds measured up close with the Dopplers. This means that there might be more EF4 and Ef5 tornadoes than we think.

More Sunday and Monday. Follow tweets from conference participants, including yours truly on Twitter by searching for the hashtag #nsww. My Twitter handle is @wxhistorian.

Category: Pre-November 2010 Posts