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7 March 2011
Spotting A Tornado On Your iPhone
There are some fabulous apps now for mobile devices (like the iPhone and iPad) that give you real-time radar images. So here is a blog post on how to do some basic interpretation of what you are looking at, and whether or not it is dangerous. In other words, is that blob of red on my iPhone likely to blow me away! First, what app should you get? After reading …
28 February 2011
One Dead in Tennessee Tornado
A busy day for me today. Lots of wind damage across North Alabama and a tornado just over the line in Tennessee. This is what the radar looked like at the time of the touchdown. Damage is heavy across the north end of the county, and three mobile homes near Estill Springs are just gone. One of the fatalities occurred there. While on the air, the image below is what …
18 February 2011
Bats In The Radar
Every forecaster can tell you about seeing birds and bats on radar. It actually happens quite frequently. I’ve long thought that this data could be of value to biologists, and now it seems they do as well! Great report from the BBC on it below.
8 December 2010
The St. Louis Arch and Splitting Squall Lines
A friend sent me this XKCD cartoon today. This is actually something meteorologists get asked about all the time! Dozens of people have told me that there is a rainfall hole over their house! I suspect many of you reading this have thought the same thing. As weather radar has become available in real time on the web, this belief has grown markedly. I even found a discussion in a …
26 October 2010
Autumn Twisters On The Prowl
When most folks think of tornadoes, they imagine a warm spring afternoon suddenly turning stormy. More often than not this is true but there are glaring exceptions. Last night was one and Tuesday will be another. A powerful storm system has been winding up in the Plains. Last night a band of storms from Texas to Alabama brought tornadoes and large hail. Here in North Alabama, I was up for much …
3 June 2010
Oil Now in Areas Open To Fishing
There are several ways of seeing the extent of the oil slick on the water in the Gulf of Mexico. Visible light is just one way. A better way may very well be to use Synthetic Aperture Radar and look at the Gulf in high frequency radio light. The SAR image to the right is courtesy of CSTARS and the European Space Agency. It shows the oil well. It also …
28 April 2010
Albertville Was Luckier Than Most- Here is why.
The EF 3 tornado that hit Albertville developed very rapidly. It first touched down just west of the city. It was on the ground for about 30 minutes and lifted near Geraldine in Dekalb County. We were able to give nearly 30 minutes warning for the folks in Geraldine. Albertville had 7 to 8 minutes. That may not sound like much, but for a town at the beginning of the …
11 October 2009
How To Interpret Weather Radar (A short course with no math!)
A SHORT HISTORY FIRST Weather radar is now a common site on any TV weathercast, and radar images are all over the Internet. It wasn’t really meant to be that way though…. Apparently, the first weather radar image of a dangerous storm shown on TV live was back in 1961. A Houston TV station sent a young reporter to Galveston to cover the approach of Hurricane Carla. It was a mean …
12 April 2009
Twisters and Ice From The Sky
Good Friday 2009 will long be remembered in Alabama and Tennessee. Huge hailstones, and violent tornadoes pounded the region. Only two deaths, and some 50 injuries, but a lot of destruction. It certainly could have been worse, and to families that lost loved ones and homes, it is a tragedy that will be remembered for a life time. Many times, when severe storms hit, the only view of hail or …
27 May 2005
Hydro ID off of ARMOR
27 May, 2005 I showed some of our first echo id data on air at 10pm Thursday.(See the last blog) Using ARMOR and it’s dual polarimetric capability, a computer program can be run to analyze the radar echoes using different variables like differential reflectivity and specific differential phase etc. (I have a link at the end that will explain these) This program can then estimate whether the echo is rain..sleet …
Dan Satterfield has worked as an on air meteorologist for 32 years in Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama. Forecasting weather is Dan's job, but all of Earth Science is his passion. This journal is where Dan writes about things he has too little time for on air. Dan blogs about peer-reviewed Earth science for Junior High level audiences and up.