gymengineer

I think many of you would be interested to read the NWS Service Assessment after the Super-Tuesday Tornado Outbreak in 2008: http://www.weather.gov/os/assessments/pdfs/super_tuesday.pdf Here were the first few of the findings and recommendations: "Finding 1: Relatively few of the tornado warnings or statements contained wording or call to action statements indicating the urgency and danger of the situation, even when tornadoes and damage were confirmed (i.e., "this is an extremely dangerous and life- threatening situation"). Recommendation 1a: NWS Instruction 10-511 should provide guidance on using wording and call to action statements in tornado warnings and severe weather statements that convey appropriate urgency and danger. Recommendation 1b: WDTB should develop training for warning forecasters on how and when to use explicit wording that conveys the urgency and danger of a situation. Finding 2a: Some media partners interviewed prefer more definitive tornado warnings and SVSs. Finding 2b: A majority of the tornado warnings contained wording such as "Doppler Radar indicated a severe thunderstorm capable of producing a tornado." It is phrases such as this that make it unclear whether or not there is a tornado on the ground. Recommendation 2: The NWS should provide guidance on wording that increases the chances of improved public response during tornadic events where tornadoes have been confirmed. Clear wording such as "a tornado has been confirmed…" or "a tornado is on the ground at...and is moving…" should increase the probability that a warning will get an appropriate and immediate response. Finding 3: There was no coordination between WFO Nashville and WFO Louisville on the Allen County tornado warning. Recommendation 3: NWS should require regions to develop severe weather coordination procedures between neighboring offices." Do any of you know in more detail how much progress has been made on these first three recommendations?

The "tornado emergency" wording has helped, but is not an officially consistent policy across forecast areas yet. Perhaps there will be a push to standardize the usage across all offices after the NWS Service Assessments from these tornado outbreaks? Assuming this list from wikipedia is accurate-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_previously_issued_tornado_emergencies -- you can notice some prominent tornadoes not getting such a warning and others that did but probably didn't require one based on the criteria established by the Des Moines office (http://www.crh.noaa.gov/images/dmx/Media%20Advisory%202010-01.pdf). "A large and catastrophic tornado has been confirmed and will continue (A radar signature alone is not sufficient) It is going to have a high impact and/or affect a highly vulnerable population (Historically, this probably has happened once every 10 years in our warning area.) Numerous fatalities expected." I don't think just having tornado emergency warnings standardized will solve the problem of high death tolls. I agree with Ian that communication is a key issue-- I'm envisioning a well-coordinated training and cooperation system to link the NWS mets to the TV mets during "tornado emergency" situations, with a standardized template listing key points to emphasize during the TV coverage about how dire the impending situation is. In addition to a standardized "tornado emergency" use, how about a "confirmed" Tornado Warning vs. a "radar-indicated" Tornado Warning? I know the wording is already included in the warning text itself, and any new warning in a life-and-death type weather phenomenon is going to take lots of outreach and public education. But, maybe that would eventually help the public understand that in a specific type of warning, you need to get underground now. And as for what to do in potential F4/F5's---a topic that came up in threads after the AL tornado outbreak in April-- I did hear the KFOR met say something extraordinary during the peak of the OK outbreak. He explicitly used the phrasing "get out of the way" many times in addition to the "get underground" phrasing. While he did not tell people to get in their cars and drive away from the tornado, his phrasing implied that in a general sense, you might not survive if you were in the path of the tornado while at home.

Well 1500 people are/were unaccounted for, not missing like those bodies swept out to sea that will never be recovered after a tsunami. In Tuscaloosa, that number went from 400 down to 12 without an appreciable increase in the death toll. Probably the vast majority of the still missing will be accounted for, alive, in the coming days. (Out of town, etc..)

Those Mike Bettes videos still get to me.....that raw emotion coming upon the scene, with a 'national'-type anchor describing seeing the dead bodies and injuries and then breaking down even more in later live shots. Maybe especially since he is normally one of the more wooden Weather Channel on air mets, just groomed in his role for his height and his looks, it's stirring to see him break down like this.

I think the Moore tornado was just so well covered on live TV as it was still early in its track to the south of the immediate OKC suburbs (wall-to-wall news coverage) that people were as well warned as they ever would be for such an event. That 36 death toll would not have happened with a somewhat weaker tornado and really showed what a monster the storm was to be able to still kill over 30 in such a well-warned situation. The F4 in 2003 that caused F3 damage in Moore didn't cause any fatalities. As for Pleasant Grove-- maybe it was that the tornado lifted somewhat shy of downtown Birmingham? The Tuscaloosa/Birmingham tornado this past April in Jefferson County went over a similar area and killed 19. I remember the death toll over 30 for Pleasant Grove was already shocking. But for my entire lifetime until this year, it seemed like around 30 was kind of the ceiling for number of deaths in the most monstrous of tornadoes. Any death toll over 10 in a single tornado was a multi-cycle national news story (like Andover in '91, Catoosa '93).

[quote name='HurricaneJosh' timestamp='1306153442' post='704301' Re: the hospital... It's beaten up, but the actual structure looks to be intact, based on the images I've seen. Yup-- I saw the photos of the structure. I meant that perhaps in a hospital, you have people who cannot easily move out of a room (to get them away from windows, flying debris, etc.) all concentrated in one building... kind of like the heart wrenching stories we read after Katrina about the doctors and nurses struggling with moving some of their patients up to higher levels when the storm surge came in. But of course, that was just a guess I threw out there-- probably not correct.

With the AL outbreak, there was the talk of the early morning severe weather knocking out power and therefore leaving parts of the population vunerable to not getting enough warning in the late afternoon tornadoes. Especially with that outbreak still fresh in everyone's minds, having this massive death toll yet again just seems unreal. I'm sure it will come out in the NWS Service Assessment as to "why" it happened here, but F4's and F5's going across downtowns have not been accompanied by this type of death toll since the tornado warning system really got established. 1966- Both Jackson MS and Topeka, Kansas had F5's through the cities, with the Topeka one pretty much through downtown-- 19 died in the Jackson area and 16 died in the Topeka tornado. 1970- Lubbock, TX had an F5 go through downtown, including having a skyscraper in its path. There were 28 deaths there. 1979- Wichita Falls, TX, had the massive F4 mow through the city-- 42 deaths. Maybe here, there were special circumstances, like a large amount of fatalities in one building-- we'll see if a lot of the deaths happened in the hospital itself.

You probably are familiar with this site-- just wanted to make sure you knew of it if you didn't already: http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/vtec/#2010-O-NEW-KLWX-BZ-W-0001 Click on "Radar Map." While there's no looping function, you can scroll the "event timeline" bar from left to right to see individual radar frames throughout the storm.