Starship Asterisk*

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

Chris Peterson wrote:

BDanielMayfield wrote: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 wrote: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?

• The Perils of Girly Hurricanes

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/weather/hurricane/tropical-cyclone-names.htm wrote:
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.

neufer wrote:

• The Perils of Girly Hurricanes

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/weather/hurricane/tropical-cyclone-names.htm wrote:
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 wrote:

neufer wrote:

• The Perils of Girly Hurricanes

[url=http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/weather/hurricane/tropical-cyclone-names.htm]usatoday[/url] wrote: 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?

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.

neufer wrote:

• The Perils of Girly Hurricanes

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/weather/hurricane/tropical-cyclone-names.htm wrote:
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.

Nitpicker wrote:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/06/03/are_hurricanes_named_after_women_more_dangerous_not_so_fast.html wrote:
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.

orin stepanek wrote: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!

neufer wrote:

neufer wrote:

• The Perils of Girly Hurricanes

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/weather/hurricane/tropical-cyclone-names.htm wrote:
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 )

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