I wish to congratulate the organizers of Louisville's Gazebo Fest for cancelling the festival proceedings Sunday night. It was exactly the right decision to make and it may have saved lives.  Below is an image of damaging wind reports (blue) and tornado reports (red) Sunday. Note there were quite a few damaging wind reports around Louisville. You may recall that in neighboring Indiana, State Fair officials in 2011 failed to cancel events even though their meteorologist advised them to do so. The results were fatal: Seven people died and 58 were injured. The fair officials, reportedly, were influenced by a law enforcement officer who looked at radar on his phone. Generally, that type of radar display did not show the level of detail needed to spot the damaging winds. Plus, most law enforcement people do not have any formal meteorological training. And, just last week, there was a nearly identical high wind-caused stage collapse in Mexico that killed nine. Organizers of outdoor eve...

Saturday, we had an awful tragedy in Kansas when a young man who was a husband and father of three children was killed by lightning while running in an endurance race at Elk State Park . CBS News has the background story, here . A key excerpt of the CBS Story, quoting the event organizer, About two-and-a-half hours before Mr. Stanley's death, I tweeted (below) about golfers continuing to play as lightning flashed in the Wichita area. My second sentence was a reference to the common remark after a storm-related tragedy that the storm was a " surprise " or there was "no warning." As the CBS quote above demonstrates, the comment was, unfortunately, prescient. Stipulating that I do not have any knowledge as to the procedures the Flat Rock Trail Race may or may not have had in place, I am going to discuss outdoor events, in general.  What can we learn from this case to help prevent future tragedies?  The first item is very simple: All of thes...

The Critical Nature of Expert Weather Warnings  For Event Organizers Two items have come together during the last four days that I want to bring to the attention of our readers. We begin with a video taken Saturday evening at the Country Stampede, a 3-day outdoor concert and event held this year in Topeka, Kansas. Video via Twitter and WIBW Radio's Shawn Wheat People in attendance talked about the ineffective efforts of the organizers to alert attendees to the threat of lightning and get them to safety (their cars). Since the video and comments were posted on Twitter, I have been trying to get the facts as to what occurred and, as I write this, I still do not have all of them. But, they aren't needed to make several important  points about this type of event. The National Weather Service does not explicitly forecast lightning. They do not have the second-by-second lightning data nor do they have the patented techniques we had (and, I'm sure, still h...