AtticaFanatica

If I cared all that much about money, I wouldn't have gone into meteorology in the first place, I'm much more motivated by advancing the science or improving the lives of the population as a whole.

Is your desired area of expertise climate change?

Haha, yeah, that'd be nice, but it's not going anywhere.

This makes a lot of sense and I hope it goes through. It would be even better if it could be combined with sector scanning, but I realize that's much more difficult to implement.

They're Doppler. One of them was modified for use as a mobile weather radar, and was used in V2. http://www.cirpas.org/mobileRadarTruck.html

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The prototype phased-array radar in Norman scans a 90 degree sector and can scan a volume in ~30 sec., but that's a long way off from going national.

But really, this isn't difficult folks, put some state money toward community shelters in highly populated areas, promote the benefits of storms shelters (safety, piece of mind, increased home valuation, etc.), and inform the public that they need to have a plan. It certainly worked here.

Thread's awesome right now.

I tried to say this and it took me like 10 posts, well stated.

Do we need a new thread for everything?

Probably, but there's lots of stupid people so, you know...

I know you're swimming in a conjecture pool today, but let's wait for the numbers before we describe it that way.

You tell 'em!!!

So you want media members to: 1) Guess the strength of an approaching tornado based on visuals (huge error bars) 2) Guess the path the tornado will be taking into the city (huge error bars) 3) Know the type of structures and their fortitude in the area where you're guessing the tornado will be striking (huge error bars) 4) And then use that information to let the audience members know that if they live in specific area x that their chances of survival are y huge error bars x huge error bars x huge error bars always yields terrific results I couldn't think of a bigger waste of time and energy then having media members include a bunch of qualifiers based on shoddy information in telling people that this is their best chance of survival. It's great that you think they deserved to know, but honestly, it's unrealistic to think that type of information could be conveyed to the public with any sort of accuracy.

Based on...

I can't believe the criticism of media members, who did an extraordinary job yesterday, based on no data, a lot of speculation, and a lot of crappy alternative plans. Sometimes in extreme natural disasters, people die. It's not optimal, it's quite regrettable, but we live in a society that has fairly large population densities. There is no perfect solution and the one used now is the best in the aggregate.

Am I just talking to myself or have we been through this?

Yeah, that's what I was referring to.

a tornado shelter?

Yes, but using isolated cases doesn't get you anywhere since there is no solution that eliminates fatalities; you could use the same argument no matter what.

I think you're forgetting one major point. Even in large tornadoes, there is a fairly small area that will be impacted by violent tornadic winds. There are a lot of people that will be impacted, but by lesser tornado winds that are easily survivable in a structure. As I mentioned, real-time forecasting of exactly where in a city or town a tornado is moving is not exact. As a result, we cannot pinpoint who is going to be impacted by violent winds and who is not. Mass evacuation, then, must send people from low mortality locations outside of the violent winds into their cars. If those people are impacted by the same winds (strong, but not violent), their probability of injury or death has increased because cars are so much more dangerous than structures. If those people are impacted by violent winds because the tornado changes path or they get confused, their probability of injury or death has spiked. Either way, more people away from the strongest winds are dying. I doubt that real-time forecasting is sharp enough, evacuation plans clear enough, and mortality rates high enough that such a plan makes sense.

Yes, while real-time observations of tornadoes are much better than they used to be and can be communicated more efficiently through new media, it's still a guessing game to some extent. Tornadoes change direction/translational speed and undergo rapid fluctuations in intensity over short-time scales (certainly shorter than the observing period of the 88D). Trying to orchestrate a rapid mass-scale evacuation is not reasonable IMO. That being said, if I were in that situation myself (I wouldn't be, I have a tornado shelter and I'd be out chasing anyway), I'd have to think about getting out of town based on what I know about tornadoes and being familiar with them from an observational perspective.

That's some legit storm inflow E of the tornado.

In the Moore tornado, the fatality rate in the strongest presumed wind areas was ~2%. That was an ideal situation though, as the media was great, many residents had tornado shelters, the residents largely heeded warnings, and the warning lead time was huge. In this case, the media was great, the warning time was huge, but it's unclear if warnings were heeded and/or if shelter was adequate. That being said, I think, based on previous studies, that you're likely overstating the fatality rate in the most violent areas of this tornado. I assume it will be looked at eventually. Regardless, I doubt very seriously that the fatality rate will get as high as to advocate media sending hundreds if not thousands of civilians to the streets into their cars to flee the tornado. The impending chaos and traffic jams would be a complete disaster. I don't think we want to know what the fatality rate is of a violent tornado making a direct hit on a civilian in a motor vehicle. Let's just say it's far, far worse. In the end, the media did their job, they did it well, and they did it a way that maximized the probability that the citizens of the town as a whole would survive. Any indication otherwise is not supported by the available information at this time.