Oy! This one is really bad.  Oklahoma Senate Democrat Mark Mann has introduced a bill into the Senate calling for licenses for storm chasers but only those associated with the University of Oklahoma (I sense they are, at least in part, behind this) and TV (not radio or other news media) can be licensed! Worse, the bill allows untrained storm chasers to use the same automotive warning lights used by police and fire! This is just begging for abuse with auto accidents being the consequences.  When we had the National Storm Chasing Convention in Wichita a few years ago, I invited a member of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol to sit with Kansas law enforcement and emergency management to sit with a panel of storm chasers. The OK Highway Patrol officer, Pat Mays, was adamant that they love storm chasers (as long as we drive according to the law) and begged us to call-in real-time reports.  Keeping in mind that a constitution limits governments' powers  (as opposed to the peoples...

2022 tornado, image by Ben Holcomb The NWS did not  provide an advance warning of this Kansas tornado as the tornado was in progress when the warning was issued. [If you aren't a meteorologist or meteorology student, feel free to skip this post.] On December 1, we published a piece outlining our recommendations pertaining to the future of the National Weather Service . There are serious  issues pertaining to the way meteorologists are educated and trained in 2024 that desperately need to be addressed in 2025.  Today, I want to focus on one of the recommendations pertaining to meteorologists' training:   There is an expectation that meteorologists should be able to intervene and change a forecast when the computer forecasts are obviously wrong. But, as aviation safety has learned, there is no way for people to overrule defective automation output when they have little or no experience doing so.  An analogy: Why did Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash in 2013 in...