The National Weather Service's Issues With Tornado Warnings Have Reached the Crisis Level. Inadequate North Dakota Warning While the National Weather Service's  forecast for tornadoes in North Dakota yesterday was excellent, the tornado warning for the Bismarck area last night left a great deal to be desired. People could easily have been killed by the late tornado warning. The National Weather Service (NWS) radar showed both a hook echo by 10:19 (left) and strong rotation on the Doppler wind display (right) by 10:20. There is no question a tornado warning should have been issued by this time. The hook had characteristics of a debris ball -- making a tornado quite likely.  Unfortunately, the tornado warning wasn't issued for another six minutes.  Meanwhile, chasers and static cameras (see below) were capturing and transmitting images of the tornado. This static camera shows the tornado in the right side of the image. We don't know the exact starting time of the tornad...

Dr. Richard Spinrad Just-departed NOAA administrator Dr. Richard Spinrad has posted a piece on his LinkedIn account pertaining to NOAA and the Trump Administration’s ongoing efforts to tackle America’s $37 trillion-dollar deficit. His comments are reproduced in their entirety below. To my knowledge, so far, no cuts to weather forecasting or NOAA have been proposed by Elon Musk's DOGE or President Trump nor has the "elimination" of NOAA been proposed.    Dr. Spinrad writes:  Before modern NOAA existed … an unforecasted hurricane hit Galveston in 1900 destroying the city and killing about 8,000 people.  He went on to write -- with remarkable chutzpah --  So go ahead Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump, fire those NOAA employees and cut the agency’s budget, but have the guts to stand up and take the hit for the deaths and destruction that result…”   My reply: In 2011, 41 years after NOAA was created, a wrongly-forecast EF-5 tornado struck the city of Joplin, Missouri, kil...

You can read what happened and my strong response.   Fact: hail is not life-threatening. On average, the U.S. loses one person per decade  due to hail. This is exactly how you (inadvertently) train the population to ignore weather warnings! See, Joplin !

A tornado occurred in the Joplin area early yesterday afternoon and, unfortunately, there were issues with the National Weather Service's warning just as there were on that terrible day in May, 2011, when 161 people lost their lives in that horribly warned tornado .  According to KSNF-TV , which could view the tornado from its cloud camera (just as it did with the May 22, 2011, tornado ), the tornado touched down at 1:35pm. Unfortunately, the tornado warning wasn't issued until 1:42pm, which made for a "lead-time" of an awful -7 minutes.  Below is a screen capture of a video of the tornado (the video is at the red link, above). There's a tornado siren in the video and it is not  rotating -- meaning it is not sounding! Even worse, per a meteorologist in the region, when the tornado was first reported, the NWS called it -- you guessed it! -- a "landspout." Increasingly, I must ask: what training are NWS meteorologists receiving? While warning of this torna...

Dear Colleagues, I don't know what prompted the fad of calling tornadoes "landspouts" but, in my opinion, it should stop. Here is the definition of a landspout per the Glossary of Meteorology: Note that it states: The parent cloud does not contain a preexisting midlevel mesocyclone... See non-supercell tornado . [emphasis mine] There were at least three tornadoes called "landspouts" yesterday. This was from Kansas. The tornado shown above came from the mesocyclone associated with the tornado warning at lower left. There was a large tornado a few minutes later. I don't know whether the pictured tornado grew or whether it was what is correctly called a "satellite tornado." Same thing in Texas. At right, the mesocyclone at the time of the "landspout" report is clearly visible.  I've had members of the public ask me, "what is a landspout?" All we are doing with all of these (incorrect) landspout reports is confusing people! Land...

The National Weather Service (NWS) – a truly essential federal agency --  literally  cannot pay its bills, according to Bloomberg . Some vendors may have to wait a year before getting paid!  As we saw last night and earlier today with extensive tornado (example below) and flood damage from Texas to Florida that caused more than 700,000 people to lose power, the NWS is essential to save lives, avert property loss, and provide the atmospheric and oceanic data needed for personal safety, commerce, and science across the Nation and the World.  Lake Charles this morning   Slidell, MS Tornado this morning Nevertheless, the NWS, from my observations, is troubled agency. The unpaid bill and other issues are significantly worse than described in the article. For example, ·        The water was turned off for a day at the NWS office that serves the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex. ·        The  essential  w...

Congratulations on your rebuilding and thank you for all of the kindnesses you showed me when I was addressing your chamber of commerce, when I was interviewing many of you, and when I was there to present When the Sirens Were Silent . I have written so much about the tornado and the unnecessary loss of life it caused I want to keep this fairly short.  JMag  has a number of commemorative stories about the storm.  I hope it is many, many decades before you have to deal with a weather catastrophe again. 

Yesterday's Joplin Globe  had an extensive article about the tornado warning system the day of the horrific tornado ten years ago and how the warning system has changed since. The article did a thorough interview of a Joplinite who accidentally drove into the tornado. The man, Stan Walters, said, He did not hear the sirens. If he had heard them, he would have stayed put. While sirens should not  be a primary warning method (more below), the fact is he didn't hear the sirens because they were not sounded in a useful manner that day, thus the title of my book about the storm .  The good news is that Joplin has completely changed its siren activation policy. The city has created a siren activation web site, which is here . During a tornado or extreme winds, they will activate the sirens for three minutes, turn them off for three minutes, and repeat until the danger has passed.  Given the advances in technology since 2011, everyone should: Use a tornado watch to tip you ...

In terms of loss of life it was the worst tornado in 64 years and the worst-ever in the tornado warning era. That was due to a rare failure of the tornado warning system. Only When the Sirens Were Silent  tells the true story of what went wrong that day. Here is the Washington Post's  review . The book also contains three unique sets of tornado safety recommendations: for home, work and school.  The paperback sold out quickly. I priced the ebook so it would be affordable to all: just $2.99. Hope you will consider reading it. 

Saturday the 22nd is the tenth anniversary of the horrific Joplin Tornado. The storm killed 161 people.  Sunday's Kansas City Star  has a nice story of the recovery including a profile of medical students graduating from the new medical college in the city.  If you would like to read the story of that terrible afternoon, I'd like to recommend When the Sirens Were Silent . The paper copies sold out very quickly but it is available by ebook at the link. 

One month from today is the tenth anniversary of the catastrophic Joplin Tornado which killed 161 people.  As you read the various articles that will come out over the next month, keep in mind that the tornado warning system failed the people of Joplin which is why the death toll was so high. When the Sirens Were Silent  explains what went wrong -- a story some don't want you to hear. The book includes state-of-the-art tornado safety procedures for work, school and home. 

Jaime Green's camera was pointed directly at the tornado but it was completely invisible May 21st is the tenth anniversary of the horrific Joplin Tornado which killed 161 people. It was one of the rare cases of the tornado warning system failing during a major storm. When combined with the fact the tornado could not been seen as it approached people were caught completely off-guard. This is why we urge you to act on the tornado warnings rather than going outside (and putting yourself in danger) to look for the storm.  Because we never want "another Joplin," I wrote and published a book about this unique, horrific storm. It is available for just $2.99, here . We set the price very low because we want everyone to learn the lessons of Joplin so this never happens again.  When the Sirens Were Silent   was meticulously researched. Here is a review from Amazon.com written by a victim of the storm.  Customer Review 5.0 out of 5 stars   I just read an accurate descripti...

Charles is the former president of the Kansas Soybean Association. I appreciate his endorsement of When the Sirens Were Silent  which is the story of the Joplin Tornado.  If you received a gift card for Christmas....  

The Joplin Tornado about twenty seconds after it touched down. Basehunters' photo. Used with permission.  Today is the anniversary of a tragic event in American history.  The City of Joplin was blindsided by the tornado.  It was one of the rare days in which weather science let down its fellow countrymen.    Joplin has rebuilt and is proud of what it has achieved in the wake of that awful evening. We salute them . And, while -- even today -- some tornadoes are incredibly difficult to warn-of effectively, that wasn't the case for Joplin's. It was straightforward. Still, weather science and emergency management both failed. Plus, everything that could have gone wrong did, all the way town to the fact that the tornado was rain-wrapped and no one could see visually (the above photo was from behind  the tornado). One hundred sixty-one people died; probably 100 to 120 more than necessary (a tornado of this violence in a densely populated area kills re...

Kathleen and I knew yesterday evening was going to be special. I was especially looking forward to Mr. Tornado  because of the many hours I spent assisting the producers. And, I was also looking forward to the NOVA episode on tornadoes that immediately preceded it. As sublime as yesterday's  Mr. Tornado  was (review below), the NOVA episode was just awful. Error after error after error plus just plain falsehoods. For example, the image below was most definitely  not  how Joplin appeared ten minutes before the tornado. Doppler radar was not "introduced" in 1973. Major tornadoes are not getting worse because of global warming, et cetera. I do not wish to produce a litany of its errors. If you want to learn the history of the tornado warning system, I recommend my book, Warnings . But there is one item from NOVA about which I do want to focus: like the movie Twister,  NOVA kept harping on warnings needing more lead time. The research of Dr. Kevin Simmon...

I can hardly believe what I just read: the National Weather Service (NWS) is going to extend its awful 'impact-based' tornado warning concept to its flash flood warnings. There is so much wrong with this, I hardly know where to begin. Before we go further, I am basing what I am writing about the new flash flood warnings on  NBC News'  and  The Washington Post's  coverage of this announcement. "Impact-Based" (paraphrasing: 'you will die if not in shelter') tornado warnings (IBW) were/are designed to scare people into taking action (since their introduction, they've toned down the language just a bit). The motivation for IBW was the National Weather Service's failure to grasp what actually went wrong in the Joplin Tornado catastrophe. In the wake of the worst death toll in more than sixty years, the worst of the tornado warning era, the NWS issued a highly flawed report (and that characterization is giving them the benefit of the doubt) abo...