One year ago today, the beautiful but tragic Andover, KS EF3 #tornado happened. Here are the Dominator drone and ground perspectives captured on this solo chase. My FB live stream is what caused the tornado sirens to be activated just prior to the tornado warning being issued.…

NWS Los Angeles @NWSLosAngeles
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Due to the potential for strong winds and heavy snow, a BLIZZARD WARNING was issued for the #LACounty and #VenturaCounty mountains from 4 am Friday to 4 pm Saturday. Snow accumulations up to 5 feet and wind gusts in excess of 55 mph are expected. #CAsnow #CAwx
4:44 AM · Feb 22, 2023 //

“I have to be totally honest with you guys,” a California meteorologist said this week. “I’ve actually never seen a blizzard warning.” //

Although it’s fun to conjecture about the streets of Hollywood covered in snow, it’s still unlikely, although white powder could hit the surrounding mountains and hills and more could land on the Hollywood sign, which sits at about 1,600 feet.

Twice a day, every day of the year, weather balloons are released simultaneously from almost 900 locations worldwide! This includes 92 released by the National Weather Service in the US and its territories. The balloon flights last for around 2 hours, can drift as far as 125 miles away, and rise up to over 100,000 ft. (about 20 miles) in the atmosphere! //

A parachute, attached to the end of the balloon, allows the radiosonde to fall slowly to the ground at speeds less than 22 mph after the balloon bursts. Each radiosonde contains a mailing bag and instructions on what to do if you find one. About 20% of the 75,000 radiosondes sent up each year in the US are found and returned. //

Weather balloons are the primary source of data above the ground. They provide valuable input for computer forecast models, local data for meteorologists to make forecasts and predict storms, and data for research. Computer forecast models which use weather balloon data are used by all forecasters worldwide, from National Weather Service meteorologists to your local TV weatherman! Without this information, accurate forecasts beyond a few hours would be almost impossible!

What the greenies don’t understand, or can’t understand, or refuse to understand, or perhaps understand but pretend they don’t, or can’t, is that with fossil fuels, we can make an inhospitable climate more hospitable. The greens instead insist that fossil fuels have made and continue making an already hospitable climate inhospitable. But of course, any sentient human being knows this is violently foolish.

To prove how foolish this is, ask the people wiped out in Pompeii how hospitable the climate was on that day.

Or perhaps we might ask the 300,000 who died in 1839 during the deadly Cyclone how nice Mother Nature was on that lovely morning in India.

Or maybe the 1,000,000 who died in Bhola, Bangladesh, in 1970 from that weather event might have a different opinion.

Or we could ask the 2,000,000 dead Chinese who perished in 1887 during the Yellow River Flood. If not them, how about the 4,000,000 Chinese who perished 50 years later in yet another Yellow River Flood, this one occurring in 1931?

The 230,000 Chinese who died in 1975 during Typhoon Nina probably weren’t huge fans of the weather. Nor the 8,000 who died in the San Zenón hurricane in the Dominican Republic in 1935. And then there’s the 3,100 who died during the Cuba hurricane in the Cayman Islands in 1932…

Out of curiosity, how much C02 was in the atmosphere in 1887? Or in 1931? How about 1975?

Yeah, folks, don’t let the alarmists fool you today. Sure it’s hot. Of course, it’s hot. It might even be record-breaking hot. Records are made to be broken. It is July. We are in the peak of Summer.

The strategy from a public policy standpoint should be energy abundance and energy reliability so that as many people throughout the country, indeed throughout the world, have access to air conditioning during heatwaves and heaters powered by natural gas during winter freezes, as much of both as we can make possible through technological innovation, human ingenuity, sound market principles, and minimal government interference.

In other words, memo to politicians: Shut up and get out of the way. Allow the private sector to provide energy resources to those most in need of them, especially when they are most in need of them. In other words, don’t just do something; sit there.

Because even though the weather outside is frightful, the AC is so delightful. And since we’ve no place to go, let it blow, let it blow, let it blow…

When faced with these conditions, our bodies call upon a well-known mechanism to keep us from overheating: sweating. As perspiration evaporates from the skin, it cools the body’s temperature. But if the air is not only hot but also already filled with moisture, less sweat can evaporate, and this safety feature fails. In India, high temperatures and humidity are increasingly combining to pose a deadly threat—one the country isn’t prepared for.
This danger to human life is measured using “wet-bulb temperature”—the lowest temperature that air can be cooled to via evaporation. It’s determined by wrapping the bulb of a thermometer in a wet cloth and seeing what temperature is recorded. Essentially the bulb is you—or me, or Lakshmanan—the wet cloth is our sweating skin, and the temperature recorded is the coolest we can hope to get by sweating.

When heat and humidity combine to push wet-bulb temperatures past 32° Celsius, physical exertion becomes dangerous. Consistent exposure to high wet-bulb temperatures—35° Celsius and above—can be fatal. At this point the sweating mechanism shuts down, leading to death in six hours. //

At night the body should recover from the daytime assault of heat, but because nights are getting hotter, that recovery is hampered, says Dutta. Whenever people talk about the effects of heat, they usually refer to its direct effects—such as heat exhaustion and stroke, which can be fatal or debilitating—but these are only the tip of the iceberg, he says. “If heat stays high in the night, it affects the body’s homeostasis, its ability to regulate and maintain its internal body temperature.” Upset this and your cellular and metabolic activities become disrupted, which can be a driver of disease, and can even be fatal itself.

Storm Events Database
The Storm Events Database contains the records used to create the official NOAA Storm Data publication, documenting:

The occurrence of storms and other significant weather phenomena having sufficient intensity to cause loss of life, injuries, significant property damage, and/or disruption to commerce;
Rare, unusual, weather phenomena that generate media attention, such as snow flurries in South Florida or the San Diego coastal area; and
Other significant meteorological events, such as record maximum or minimum temperatures or precipitation that occur in connection with another event.

The database currently contains data from January 1950 to December 2021, as entered by NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS). Due to changes in the data collection and processing procedures over time, there are unique periods of record available depending on the event type. NCEI has performed data reformatting and standardization of event types but has not changed any data values for locations, fatalities, injuries, damage, narratives and any other event specific information. Please refer to the Database Details page for more information.

A 477-mile-long megaflash crossed three US states.

A 477-mile-long megaflash crossed three US states.
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A 477-mile-long lightning bolt crossed three southern US states, and is now verified by the World Meteorolgical Organization to be world-record breaking.

The previous record was 440.6 miles (709 km) and recorded in Brazil in 2018. Scientists say the area in which these states are located are especially prone to lightning.

The nation has seen 25 tornadoes that killed 80 or more people since 1840, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

These are the 10 deadliest tornadoes in U.S. history:

March 18, 1925: The Tri-State Tornado killed nearly 700 in Missouri, southern Illinois, and southwestern Indiana.
May 6, 1840: The Great Natchez Tornado in Mississippi killed 317.
May 27, 1896: St. Louis area tornadoes killed 305 in Missouri, Illinois, and Kentucky.
April 5, 1936: Tupelo, Miss. tornado killed 216.
April 6, 1936: Gainsville, Ga., tornado killed 203.
April 9, 1947: Woodward, Okla., tornado killed 181.
May 22, 2011: Joplin, Mo. tornado killed 158.
April 24, 1908: Tornado in Louisiana and Mississippi killed 143.
June 12, 1899: Western Wisconsin tornado killed 117.
June 8, 1953: Flint, Mich., tornado killed 116.

NEW ORLEANS — The entire New Orleans area south of Lake Pontchartrain is expected to be without power for weeks because all eight of Entergy’s transmission lines delivering electricity from the outside world failed simultaneously.

Hurricane Ida’s intense winds turned one of the main transmission towers into a heap of twisted and rusted metal along River Road at the edge of Bridge City. //

It was a staggering sight for a tower that rose 400 feet above the Avondale Shipyard and supported power lines across a 3,800 foot span to a tower across the Mississippi River in Harahan. On Monday, those same power lines could be seen in drone footage overhead, dunked into the muddy river.

That’s only one of the entry points that failed, leaving Entergy customers on what the utility officially calls an “island.” Entergy says it’s trying to assess and investigate what it acknowledged was a “catastrophic transmission failure” and scrambling to figure out how to restore power.

Entergy Louisiana CEO Phillip May said that assessment period will take at least four days, after which more than 20,000 restoration workers will pursue at least two tracks to get the lights back on:

Getting at least one of the failed transmission lines back up and running, or by generating power from within the island itself, using the power station at Nine Mile Point, or by firing up the new power plant at Michoud, in New Orleans East. //

The second option, creating a self-generated power source from within the “island,” is not ideal, but will be pursued at the same time. First, to use the 230 megawatts of power that can be generated at the New Orleans Power Station, Entergy still needs to restore enough transmission lines to deliver electricity to customers. //

In addition to the New Orleans Power Station, Entergy hopes to generate another 400 megawatts at the Nine Mile power station and use large generators to push the total electricity on the “island” above 600 megawatts. That would be enough to provide critical power to services and infrastructure but not enough for all customers to be restored, Moreno said.

Just so there is no confusion about the historic severity of the weather — century-old records were being broken every day across the state for the “lowest” high and low temperatures for the date. No one in Texas ever lived through a cold snap like that before. This raises the rhetorical question of whether the state should have planned ahead for something that had never happened before. //

To avoid issues of federal regulation, the Texas power grid is entirely localized within the state of Texas and is controlled by the Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). All transmission and production facilities are found within the physical borders of Texas so there is no interstate transmission of power. Municipalities and energy cooperatives are the retailers who buy power from the generators and sell it to the consumers in their areas. //

There is always water vapor present in natural gas flowing through a pipeline. When that temperature inside the pipe drops below freezing, the water vapor will begin to form ice on the inside of the pipeline, and this ice will continue to build up until the pipeline becomes choked or blocked completely, cutting off the flow of gas to boil the water that spins the steam turbines. //

the last “weather” related phenomenon which impacted the Texas energy system was the sustained drought in 2011, which left many generation facilities with inadequate water supplies to run the generation plants. That summer there were 100 days of weather across the state when daytime temperatures went over 100 degrees, and the lack of water created limitations on generating capacity.

Investment by network participants to prevent power shortages during the last decade focused on that problem — hence the increased investment in wind and solar generating capacity which do not rely on available supplies of water.

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Flooding and landslides in East Africa have killed dozens of people and forced hundreds of thousands from their homes. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in Australia, a period of hot, dry weather has led to a spate of bushfires.

Both weather events have been linked to higher-than-usual temperature differences between the two sides of the Indian Ocean - something meteorologists refer to as the Indian Ocean Dipole.

The Indian Ocean Dipole - often called the "Indian Niño" because of its similarity to its Pacific equivalent - refers to the difference in sea-surface temperatures in opposite parts of the Indian Ocean.

Temperatures in the eastern part of the ocean oscillate between warm and cold compared with the western part, cycling through phases referred to as "positive", "neutral" and "negative".

The dipole's positive phase this year - the strongest for six decades - means warmer sea temperatures in the western Indian Ocean region, with the opposite in the east.

The result of this unusually strong positive dipole this year has been higher-than-average rainfall and floods in eastern Africa and droughts in south-east Asia and Australia.

METAR for GLRB ROB Robertsfield Monrovia