Weather!

[BDanielMayfield]

Oh boy! (not really) Today’s forecast for my part of south Texas is tripple digit heat for the first time this year.
Time to break out the industrial strenth deoderant.

Bruce

[Beyond]

And the water with the industrial strength wetness!!

[Chris Peterson]

The view out of my office today. Six inches of heavy snow fell yesterday and last night. Should be good for the plants.

[geckzilla]

It's good to see Colorado getting some drought relief. The southwest is not so fortunate... I still restrict my water use even in absence of water shortage but I don't think my years in SoCal were comparable to what's going on there currently.

[BDanielMayfield]

We're under a Tornado Warning right now. Already had some pea sized hail. Baseball sized hail possible.

[Chris Peterson]

We're under a Tornado Warning right now. Already had some pea sized hail. Baseball sized hail possible.

We had that on Sunday. Extremely unusual here. We were at a party just 5 miles south, and for three hours in the early afternoon there were just some clouds. Little did we know what was going on at the house. Driving home we went through four inches of hail on the road. It covered the hills and mountains completely, looking like the middle of winter. Same at the house. A reverse 911 message was on the machine warning of funnel clouds (really rare in the mountains). We missed the storm, but saw the result. Must have been impressive. A friend a few miles down the road had her house hit by lightning with major damage- smoldering insulation that required breaking open the walls, damaged wires and pipes, and loads of electronics taken out. And we never even knew it was happening.

Good luck where you are... hopefully you'll get nothing worse than some wind and smallish hail.

[BDanielMayfield]

We're under a Tornado Warning right now. Already had some pea sized hail. Baseball sized hail possible.

We had that on Sunday. Extremely unusual here. We were at a party just 5 miles south, and for three hours in the early afternoon there were just some clouds. Little did we know what was going on at the house. Driving home we went through four inches of hail on the road. It covered the hills and mountains completely, looking like the middle of winter. Same at the house. A reverse 911 message was on the machine warning of funnel clouds (really rare in the mountains). We missed the storm, but saw the result. Must have been impressive. A friend a few miles down the road had her house hit by lightning with major damage- smoldering insulation that required breaking open the walls, damaged wires and pipes, and loads of electronics taken out. And we never even knew it was happening.

Good luck where you are... hopefully you'll get nothing worse than some wind and smallish hail.

Thanks Chris. Tornado threat has now pasted us by.

Just saw a National News story about a major mud/landslide in Colorado. I find your lack of mentioning it reassuring. How far away from your area was it?

[BDanielMayfield]

Sorry for the double posting.

[geckzilla]

There is really nothing quite like baseball sized hail... You see it on the news now and then and it sounds every bit as crazy as it really is. It's ridiculous that such a heavy, inanimate object could be so held high in the sky. The only way to tell the difference between it and a place recently shelled by artillery is the lack of fire!

[Chris Peterson]

Just saw a National News story about a major mud/landslide in Colorado. I find your lack of mentioning it reassuring. How far away from your area was it?

On the other side of the state, fortunately. It's an indicator of Colorado's low population density that you can have a slide so large (miles!) and inflict so little human or property damage (it was really just bad luck that the three people caught in it were there at all).

[neufer]

• The Perils of Girly Hurricanes

Forecasters formally begin naming Atlantic Basin tropical storms in 1950, using names from the international phonetic alphabet of the time: Able, Baker, Charlie, and so on. They started using female, English-language names in 1953, and only switched to alternating male and female names in 1979.

• 1953's Alice was the first Atlantic real human-name storm.
  
  1979's Bob was the first Atlantic real male-name storm.
  
  2014's Arthur will be the next Atlantic real human-name storm.

[Ann]

• The Perils of Girly Hurricanes

Forecasters formally begin naming Atlantic Basin tropical storms in 1950, using names from the international phonetic alphabet of the time: Able, Baker, Charlie, and so on. They started using female, English-language names in 1953, and only switched to alternating male and female names in 1979.

• 1953's Alice was the first Atlantic real human-name storm.
  
  1979's Bob was the first Atlantic real male-name storm.
  
  2014's Arthur will be the next Atlantic real human-name storm.

Not Art?

Ann

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

• The Perils of Girly Hurricanes

Forecasters ... started using female, English-language names in 1953, and only switched to alternating male and female names in 1979.

1953's Alice was the first Atlantic real name storm.

1979's Bob was the first real male-name storm.

2014's Arthur will be the next Atlantic storm.

Not Art?

[Beyond]

Gee, they used to call the wind Mariah, maybe they now call it Art??

[owlice]

Hurricanes Named After Women Are More Dangerous? Not So Fast.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense ... _fast.html

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study alleges that hurricanes with female names are more deadly than those with male names because—get this—people don’t take them as seriously. It’s a story that’s quickly rocketed to the front page of /r/nottheonion, where the discussion surrounding it is priceless.

Except there’s at least one major flaw in the study. From Ed Yong at National Geographic:

But [National Center for Atmospheric Research social scientist Jeff] Lazo thinks that neither the archival analysis nor the psychological experiments support the team’s conclusions. For a start, they analysed hurricane data from 1950, but hurricanes all had female names at first. They only started getting male names on alternate years in 1979. This matters because hurricanes have also, on average, been getting less deadly over time. “It could be that more people die in female-named hurricanes, simply because more people died in hurricanes on average before they started getting male names,” says Lazo.

Whoops. That’s a pretty basic error to make in a study where you’re trying to correlate deadliness of something over time. Actually,when the authors did attempt to account for this by comparing only storms after 1979, as you might expect, any correlation between names and deadliness vanished. Ideally, to back up a claim like this, you’d want to have lots of data, and there simply haven’t been enough years of named hurricanes to get a sufficient statistical significance.

[Nitpicker]

I would also have said that there is a difference between deadly and dangerous and that Sandy is more of a unisex name.

[neufer]

• The Perils of Girly Hurricanes

Forecasters formally begin naming Atlantic Basin tropical storms in 1950, using names from the international phonetic alphabet of the time: Able, Baker, Charlie, and so on. They started using female, English-language names in 1953, and only switched to alternating male and female names in 1979.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study alleges that hurricanes with female names are more deadly than those with male names because—get this—people don’t take them as seriously.

I would also have said that there is a difference between deadly and dangerous and that Sandy is more of a unisex name.

Working in the "World Weather Bldg" back in 1979 I remember that the inside joke going around was that no one would take a Hurricane Bruce seriously. (Sorry about that BDanielMayfield )

[orin stepanek]

We didn't get a hurricane but a couple of nights ago it rained so hard it was coming down sideways! I checked my guage the next day and was 2 inches exactly! It was kind of weird as channel 6 said we only had 14 hundredths while all the cities around us were reporting 1&1/2 inch to 3 inches of rain!
Anyway they are predicting heavy Thunder Storms for tonight again! I'd settle for a nice steady slow rain!

[BMAONE23]

We didn't get a hurricane but a couple of nights ago it rained so hard it was coming down sideways! I checked my guage the next day and was 2 inches exactly! It was kind of weird as channel 6 said we only had 14 hundredths while all the cities around us were reporting 1&1/2 inch to 3 inches of rain!
Anyway they are predicting heavy Thunder Storms for tonight again! I'd settle for a nice steady slow rain!

Sounds like channel 6 needs to pull the cork out of the top of their rain gauge 14 hundredths is just what was forced around the cork

[BDanielMayfield]

• The Perils of Girly Hurricanes

Working in the "World Weather Bldg" back in 1979 I remember that the inside joke going around was that no one would take a Hurricane Bruce seriously. (Sorry about that BDanielMayfield )

Thus the shift to my middle name. To my knowledge Bruce hasn't been used yet. Possibly a good thing ...

As for female hurricane and tropical storm names, having lived though Celia (a real b ich that made a direct hit on Corpus Christi in 1971), it just seems natural that they would have female names. When the wind gets high enough it sounds like a woman screaming.

Daniel

[orin stepanek]

We had a (little) rain last night! I woke up this morning and looked out the window and my neighbor's back yard was a lake! There is a low spot there and it fills up pretty good when ever we get a heavy rain. Last night was no exception as we got 3 inches of the wet stuff My wife told me that the whole street was like a river! Needless to say we got a little damp spot in the basement! It could have been worse; we just had to get the fan on it to dry it up!

[orin stepanek]

Nasty storm rolls through Nebraska last night; double tornado ravages small town of Pilger killing one and injuring sixteen!

picture from TWC home page

double twister

_2014-06-17T06-46-34_hero_tornado.jpg (7.24 KiB) Viewed 7500 times

[owlice]

Orin, I'm glad you're safe. Those tornadoes made the news here, and likely everywhere! They are quite scary viewing.

[orin stepanek]

Orin, I'm glad you're safe. Those tornadoes made the news here, and likely everywhere! They are quite scary viewing.

They are very nasty storms!

It is supposed to get to 94F today! Too hot for me; I hope the AC holds up!

[geckzilla]

It stormed and I was messing with photos because the glare of the sun was so bright that I could just barely see the storm clouds at all. Tried to photograph lightning but only got one crummy pic. Had the window up and the rain flew in my bedroom for nothing! Then the sun set and I had to take a panorama...