Cory Posted June 12, 2011 Share Posted June 12, 2011 I disagree with him about scrapping the sirens. The rest of what he wrote was pretty good though. I have a weather radio I don't use because it scared the crap out of me one night for a Flash Flood Watch........ Most of my family have weather radios put away in a closet for just this reason. They were alerted too many times for warnings way across the county, got irritated with the whole idea, and ditched them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MGorse Posted June 12, 2011 Share Posted June 12, 2011 Most of my family have weather radios put away in a closet for just this reason. They were alerted too many times for warnings way across the county, got irritated with the whole idea, and ditched them. There are probably many people that do this because of this same reason. A shame but in a way, I don't blame them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MGorse Posted June 12, 2011 Share Posted June 12, 2011 That is suprising... glad to know the Fargo TV market isnt too far behind the times That is fustrating though to me....the polygon warning was one way for us to reduce the FAR area.....but yet so many "old" systems are still based on county FIP codes and thus all the effort we do to pinpoint gets wasted. Another example occurred here yesterday. A Philadelphia radio station passed along the severe thunderstorm warning (which is great), but the polygon warning was for extreme southern New Castle County and far northern Kent County in Delaware, but they just mentioned the entire counties. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
isohume Posted June 12, 2011 Share Posted June 12, 2011 He has and continues to tackle this subject. Do you listen to Weather Brains? He has had quite a few guests on concerning tornadogenesis and similar topics. He should stay on that topic. If you look around the NWS, most offices do not issue the sort of TORs he is talking about, but their FAR scroes are just as high. He's making a false association with QLCS "low end" spin-ups. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Great Zo Posted June 12, 2011 Share Posted June 12, 2011 I don't believe Spann is barking up the right tree. He believes that by discontinuing the blanket TORs issued for "low end" spin-ups associated with squall lines...that the FAR will come down. The FAR is actually helped by these types of warnings because somewhere in that polygon there will most likely be a tornado. So, no false alarm. Spann also fails to recognize the tornado FAR taken on a national average is still very high which includes the majority of offices that dont issue those blanket type warnings. This is an issue of FAR (a nationally-tracked metric) versus false alarm area (which isn't tracked). Personally, I think of the latter as a more important extension of the former. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
isohume Posted June 12, 2011 Share Posted June 12, 2011 This is an issue of FAR (a nationally-tracked metric) versus false alarm area (which isn't tracked). Personally, I think of the latter as a more important extension of the former. The TOR polygons are supposed to be smaller than a typical SVR, you're right. But a FAR score is based on the polygon the tornado forms in regardless....as it should be. You can't say..."well since this TOR polygon was 5000 sq km and most areas didn't get affected the tornado that developed in it doesn't count, so therefore it will be scored against the FAR. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Great Zo Posted June 12, 2011 Share Posted June 12, 2011 The TOR polygons are supposed to be smaller than a typical SVR, you're right. But a FAR score is based on the polygon the tornado forms in regardless....as it should be. You can't say..."well since this TOR polygon was 5000 sq km and most areas didn't get affected the tornado that developed in it doesn't count, so therefore it will be scored against the FAR. You're totally correct in your description about FAR, but I think your post also does a great job highlighting why it's such a limited metric. What any false alarm metric, from a socio-meteorological standpoint, should be assessing, is the following: 1) Take the subset of the population within the polygon that actually heard the warning... 2) find how many of them, post-storm, perceived the threat to be insignificant or non-existent (i.e. a false alarm), and... 3) will thus allow that to factor into their decision-making in future warnings. That's such a nebulous concept -- and I'm not too surprised that false alarm area isn't tracked, because how the heck would you keep track of it? You'd have to assign an arbitrary radius to each individual severe / tornado report, saying that people within a certain distance of the event perceived the threat to be real. You'd also be asking the NWS to "lose points" based on the people who systematically ignore every warning, which isn't exactly fair. But that makes it no less important. You could have a ten-county tornado warning that "technically" isn't a false alarm, and "technically" verifies on an EF0 that knocked down one barn and five trees a mile from the southern polygon border, and might have even been a warning that the forecaster deemed meteorologically sound . The people in the other 9 counties, who got a 35 MPH wind gust and a tenth of an inch of rain, are going to be negatively affected, and less likely to act the next time around. When that happens, we can try to wish that fact away with every ounce of meteorology and warning policy we've got, pulling our collective hair out in the process -- but it won't change how people react. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
isohume Posted June 12, 2011 Share Posted June 12, 2011 That's such a nebulous concept -- and I'm not too surprised that false alarm area isn't tracked, because how the heck would you keep track of it? You'd have to assign an arbitrary radius to each individual severe / tornado report, saying that people within a certain distance of the event perceived the threat to be real. You'd also be asking the NWS to "lose points" based on the people who systematically ignore every warning, which isn't exactly fair. That's a bizarre concept really. More areas are always going to be not affected by a certain storm than will be in any given polygon. That's the nature of the science right now. We tell them where the storm is, where it is heading and at what speed. We also tell them which locations are most under the gun. We just aren't better than this to account for possible deviations in storm tracks or new storm related development. Hence the need for the error cone polygon. Another aspect, would the additive negative feedback this would give the radar forecaster. After seeing their tornado on the ground getting labeled a false alarm because it didn't affect enough area a few times...their motivation would be lowered, probably to the point of not caring anymore. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AtticaFanatica Posted June 12, 2011 Share Posted June 12, 2011 I don't believe Spann is barking up the right tree. He believes that by discontinuing the blanket TORs issued for "low end" spin-ups associated with squall lines...that the FAR will come down. The FAR is actually helped by these types of warnings because somewhere in that polygon there will most likely be a tornado. So, no false alarm. Spann also fails to recognize the tornado FAR taken on a national average is still very high which includes the majority of offices that dont issue those blanket type warnings. What Spann needs to focus on and begin dialog on is...improving the science of tornadogenesis. There is still so much we don't understand about how and why tornados develop with one storm and do not develop with very similar storms. Once we have a better undertanding of these small-scale processes...the FAR for tornado warnings will improve. I don't necessarily disagree with this, but I do wonder even if there's one complete model of tornadogenesis, how well that will translate to real-time tornado detection. As far as observations, undoubtedly, we're talking about processes occurring on unobserved spatial scales. As far as modeling, I think the warn-on forecast initiative is a nice idea, but as of now, data assimilation based forecasts are pretty bad (really nice analyses though). From a radar perspective, PAR would help, but that's a far way off. I do think that some long-standing ideas about tornadogenesis will be dying in the next few years, chief among them the "descending TVS" paradigm. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
isohume Posted June 12, 2011 Share Posted June 12, 2011 I don't necessarily disagree with this, but I do wonder even if there's one complete model of tornadogenesis, how well that will translate to real-time tornado detection. As far as observations, undoubtedly, we're talking about processes occurring on unobserved spatial scales. As far as modeling, I think the warn-on forecast initiative is a nice idea, but as of now, data assimilation based forecasts are pretty bad (really nice analyses though). From a radar perspective, PAR would help, but that's a far way off. I do think that some long-standing ideas about tornadogenesis will be dying in the next few years, chief among them the "descending TVS" paradigm. I imagine ongoing research will someday get to a point where operational applications and gains can be made. Who knows how this will happen, but it usually takes time and much work on the research end to get a practical application out that works and that is trusted. Yeah, I agree on the warn on forecast idea. I'm not saying that it can never work...but from what I've seen out of AFS grids, we are miles from that. I could see some future generation of warning procedures including an aspect or all of the idea tho. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Great Zo Posted June 12, 2011 Share Posted June 12, 2011 For a while now, I've thought that we're already pushing the limits of what computer models can do without increasing the temporal/spatial density of the observations that are fed into them. It's tough to find the money to do that with mesonets, but even tougher when considering that acquiring additional data in the vertical is going to be really tough to pull off. I can't back this point up scientifically -- it's more anecdotal -- but in short, I concur that warn-on-forecast is a long way off. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
isohume Posted June 13, 2011 Share Posted June 13, 2011 I think that is part of the issue with communicating the threat for severe weather. We warn tens of thousands of people and a handful are impacted. A normal household will never see their home hit by a tornado or destroyed by weather. A few will. Communicating the threat is difficult at best - you want people to be aware of the situation - but you don't want to scare them. That's why I'd concentrate on the storm and not the polygon if I was a TV met. I'd tell the public where the storm is, where it's headed and who will be most likely be impacted. As far as the polygon, I'd tell them briefly that is an area of uncertainty with less of a chance you'll get severe weather the farther you are from the storm track...however folks should remain vigilant as the storm may deviate from it's path or new storms could quickly develop anywhere in polygon area. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Solak Posted June 14, 2011 Share Posted June 14, 2011 This has been a fascinating thread to read. Thanks to all of you who have taken time to express your thoughts/opinions. Well done! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
meteorologist Posted June 15, 2011 Share Posted June 15, 2011 http://www.alabamawx.com/?p=48699 http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2011/06/james_spann_blasts_number_of_f.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CT Rain Posted June 15, 2011 Share Posted June 15, 2011 http://www.alabamawx.com/?p=48699 http://blog.al.com/s...umber_of_f.html Was just going to post a link to James Spann's blog. I agree with him 100%. We need to re-think the way we issue and communicate tornado warnings. The current system does not work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ian Posted June 15, 2011 Share Posted June 15, 2011 i think there's a thread on this: http://www.americanwx.com/bb/index.php/topic/19922-james-spann-speaks-to-the-media-and-the-nws-concerning/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ineedsnow Posted June 15, 2011 Share Posted June 15, 2011 I dont know why they just dont issue more severe thunderstorm warnings and put that a tornado could develop at anytime in them unless a tornado is clearly evident.. Then issue the tornado warning.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JoMo Posted June 15, 2011 Share Posted June 15, 2011 There's really just a lot of stupid people commenting here: http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2011/06/james_spann_blasts_number_of_f.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Master of Disaster Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 Been having this siren discussion here for three weeks now with one paper. This is by far the single worst article I have ever seen written on the topic: http://www.thesentinel.com/mont/Karem5-26 Here, I get quoted and I wish I had never even given them an interview now. http://www.thesentinel.com/mont/Search/siren-follow Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
k*** Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 cool story bro Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BadgerWXman Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 cool story bro sweet post brah Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JoMo Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 Been having this siren discussion here for three weeks now with one paper. This is by far the single worst article I have ever seen written on the topic: http://www.thesentin.../mont/Karem5-26 Here, I get quoted and I wish I had never even given them an interview now. http://www.thesentin...ch/siren-follow What's the writers fascination with viagra? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Master of Disaster Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 What's the writers fascination with viagra? Not a clue, but he seems to have a personal vendetta about the sirens. Its the 4-5th story they have written about it since Joplin. This is their latest one which makes us all sound like non caring public employees. http://www.thesentinel.com/mont/sirens-3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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