Sadly, at least one person perished today in an incident involving a car fire inside the dock area of the National Weather Center. A photograph I took of the burning vehicle has been retweeted hundreds of times and appeared on a number of major news outlets accompanied by information of varying accuracy. I want to set the record straight about a couple of things I’ve heard and read regarding the image.

1. I didn’t actually witness the incident. At about 3:35 p.m., I came out of my 4th floor NWC office to refill my tea kettle, and noticed a group of people, including my husband, looking and pointing at something outside the bay windows on the northeast side of the building. I could see smoke billowing from somewhere southeast of the building, but couldn’t see the source, and decided to look out the window on the end of the east wing. When I got there, I fully expected to see a grass fire on Hwy. 9 (as often happens when people carelessly flick cigarette butts out their car windows). Instead I was astonished to see this scene in our own dock area:

The "unsafe condition" on the E side of the NWC. #fire pic.twitter.com/kE1Qzm9E1t

— Robin Tanamachi (@tornatrix) April 23, 2015

2. I didn’t break any rules or disobey any instructions to get the image. As I took the photo, the PA finally chimed on: “May I have your attention, please. An unsafe condition has been reported on the east side of the building. Please move toward the center of the building.” For those not familiar with the NWC, it is an L-shaped building with wings pointing toward the north and east, and an atrium area at the elbow. I tweeted the image as I was walking away from the east window, toward the atrium, because I knew all my colleagues in other parts of the building would be wondering what the ambiguous “unsafe condition” was. I wanted to give them a way to see what was happening without having to look for themselves.

3. The image is indeed mine. My husband, who was standing right next to me, took his own photo within seconds of mine, also tweeted it, and it was also used by a number of news outlets. It looks nearly identical, but some details (such as the position of the police officer standing just outside the gate) are different.

Car on fire at the #NWC. Looks liked it crashed through the gate. Not good… pic.twitter.com/En0cKcCCCV

— Daniel T. Dawson II (@Meteodan) April 23, 2015

4. The radar trucks in the upper left part of the image are SMART-Rs, not DOWs. SMART-Rs (Shared Mobile Atmospheric Teaching and Research Radars) operate at C-band and are jointly owned and operated by OU, NSSL, Texas Tech, and Texas A&M. DOWs (Doppler on Wheels) operate at X-band and are owned and operated by the Center for Severe Weather Research in Boulder, Colorado. Although the two types of radars are used for similar severe storms research (and both operated together in VORTEX2), they represent two separate research groups.

5. The building was never evacuated. We were advised to move to the interior and shelter in place. This was likely done to prevent anyone trying to evacuate through the dock area.

6. I don’t know any more than you do about what happened. The only verifiable facts are that the car rammed through the gate (as is evident in the photo), the car burned, and one (male) person died (stated by Norman FD to several local media outlets). As of this writing, more than six hours after the incident, the bomb squad is still working on the burnt-out car. Beyond that, I consider any information about details, cause, motive, or extenuating circumstances to be only rumors and speculation. I’m satisfied to let the investigators do their jobs and notify the next of kin (who are doubtless in shock). I await a formal statement from OU Public Affairs about this incident.

In early November, I flew back to Madison, Wisconsin for the 27th AMS Conference on Severe Local Storms (or “SLS”, as we call it). For those who don’t know, I got my B.S. in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science from UW-Madison. It’s been more than a decade since I packed up my research intern cubicle at SSEC, and I was excited to get back. Experiencing Madison from a high-star hotel within a block of the Wisconsin state capitol dome and State Street was quite a different experience from being stacked, cordwood-style, with other undergraduate students in Chadbourne Hall.

I was much more involved in this conference than I have been in previous ones. This was the first SLS conference on whose program committee I served. That meant I got to review nearly 50 abstracts, helping stratify them into oral and poster slots, and had input on the daily schedule. In addition to our professional contributions, my husband and I also coordinated the informal (and infamous) Video Night for the third time. The conference co-chairs elected to forgo a formal banquet in favor of a come-and-go icebreaker with heavy appetizers, a practice that I favor continuing, because it allows attendees to interact with more than seven people at a round table over the course of the evening.

Contentwise, this SLS conference program was as good as ever. A couple of the highlights:

• Leigh Orf’s jaw-dropping 24 May 2011 tornado simulation, showcasing the power of supercomputing for visualization
• Morris Weisman and Lou Wicker’s tag team talk about the history and future of NWP
• Jim Kurzo’s award-winning talk about the PX-1000 data collected in the 20 May 2013 tornado.
• The 31 May 2013-themed session memorializing Tim Samaras, Paul Samaras, and Carl Young. In spite of the tragic underpinnings of the subject, Tim Marshall managed to get in a few laughs.
• A touching tribute session, chaired by Dan Miller, in remembrance of a number of influential scientists who passed away since the last SLS. This session was originally supposed to be part of video night, but it quickly grew to include a long list of names (including a very last-minute addition: Jim Leonard, who passed away while the conference was in progress). Given that it had a very different tone than video night, we decided to split the tributes off into their own session, which Dan Miller graciously agreed to chair.

A note to nonmeteorologists who are interested in severe weather research, particularly students considering a career in that area: Browse the conference program. Watch some of the talks.* Read the extended abstracts and examine the posters. A little more than a decade ago, it wasn’t possible for people outside the conference to access the research presented there (unless you could somehow get your hands on a limited-edition preprint volume). Now, almost the entire content of the conference is available online for public perusal. So, take advantage of it! Get a taste of what scientific research really looks like.

* Keep in mind that the talks are often a 12-minute summary of two or more years of research, coding, and mental exertion. Not all details, caveats, and nuances can be included. (That’s what seminars and peer-reviewed manuscripts are for!)

During my interview blitz last week, I was asked by multiple reporters to tie the recent Moore tornado to a presumed overall upward trend in the number of U.S. tornadoes. This was a poorly posed query, for two reasons:

Firstly, it is illogical to conflate a single event (e.g., a car accident) with an trend in those events (e.g., an increase with time in the number of car accidents).
Person A: “I got in a car accident last week, therefore the number of car accidents each year is increasing.”
Person B: “I didn’t get in a car accident last week, therefore the number of car accidents each year is not increasing.”
Neither of these statements make any sense! You need at least two data points to begin to discern a trend, and many, many more to discern a statistically significant trend.

Secondly, although media coverage of tornadoes has undoubtedly increased in the last few decades, to the best of our (researchers’) knowledge, the actual number of tornadoes has not. When adjusted for population growth (read: more eyeballs looking for tornadoes), the trend since ~1950 is essentially flat. Here we see an example of what is known as the availability heuristic: People can more easily recall recent tornadoes than those farther back in the past, especially now thanks to saturation coverage of tornadoes. Viewers may reach an erroneous conclusion that the total number of tornadoes each year is increasing. I’d imagine the same holds true for shark attacks, child abductions, and deaths from falling coconuts.

Proceedings of the recent 36th AMS Severe Local Storms conference in Nashville are now online. My new boss, Dr. Pam Heinselman, was one of the co-chairs. She never even broke a sweat!

It was a terrific conference. Highlights included:

• Dave Lewellen’s ultra-high resolution simulations of tornadoes interacting with other-than-flat topography. Some of his simulations looked remarkably like my video of the 7 November 2011 tornado interacting with the Wichita Mountains!
• Harold Brooks gave a “mythbusters”-style keynote talk about the 2011 and 2012 tornado seasons, and how the media hype (or lack thereof) squares with statistics. If you have 30 minutes, I highly recommend watching his recorded presentation. It’s an informative hoot!
• Tim Marhsall, fresh back from surveying the dangling NYC crane from Hurricane Sandy, gave back-to-back presentations about his damage surveys of the 27 April 2011 Alabama tornadoes and the 22 May 2011 Joplin, Missouri tornado. He always makes me want to rip out the walls of my house to make sure they’re toe-nailed.

There were, of course, lots of other great presentations and posters, including a couple by yours truly, but these were my three favorite.

In addition to my professional contributions, I organized the traditional, less-than-formal “photo and video night” at the conference (with some help from Dan, Lou Wicker, and Judith Z. of the AMS staff). There were contributions ranging from all over the U.S. to Australia, Japan, and Germany. We noted sadly the howling vacuum created by the absence of Dr. Bob Schlesinger – a former colleague at UW-Madison – who is famed for the uniquely-styled presentations that he usually delivers at video night. A response to my inquiry at UW indicated that Bob was unable to travel to the conference because of health issues. I organized a get-well card for him, which was soon so densely scrawled upon by dozens of people that we had to resort to using the back cover. I certainly hope Bob comes back in 2014. It just wasn’t the same without him!

This was the view from the roof of the NWC at about 8:16 p.m., before the sun dipped behind a very inconsiderate cumulus cloud kicked out by a pulse storm near Watonga.

It’s events like this that make me wish I were a better photographer!

Just after lunchtime yesterday, I was transfixed (as were many in the NWC) by live video of tornadoes near the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex. I did not chase yesterday because (a) it was a work day and (b) every time I’ve tried to chase in the DFW metroplex, it’s been a spectacular failure ending in traffic gridlock. But the supercells riding the warm front meant business. I’ve heard enough nightmare scenarios about a DFW tornado strike from the emergency management community to pass my hand over my brow and be grateful that nobody was killed.

Anyway, I’ve been fascinated by this now-famous video – shot from a helicopter – of the tornado flinging tractor-trailer rigs (or “articulated lorries”, as the BBC calls them) through the air near Lancaster, TX. I don’t know how much these rigs weigh or whether they were empty or full, but I think it’s safe to say that they weigh more than my little Corolla, a substantial SUV, or a pickup truck. I hope some of the “yahoos” watch this video and remember it the next time they consider brazenly driving into tornadoes as though they were little more than glorified dust devils.

Last weekend, I took part in an outreach event for the opening of the IMAX film Tornado Alley at the Oklahoma Science Museum. RaXPol’s caretakers kindly put me on the insurance for one day so that I could drive it up to the east side of Oklahoma City and back. I was charged with standing next to a radar truck I’d never used, to promote a film I hadn’t seen yet. I had some compunctions about that arrangement, but we were promised a free screening in exchange, so I decided to go for it. (I probably would have seen the film eventually anyway, at my own expense.) I always enjoy a chance to show off my “woman-in-science” cred, especially to a crowd that I knew would include lots of kids.

Ironically, Tornado Alley only recently came to the Oklahoma market, despite being released over a year ago and featuring many Oklahoma “talents.” I tried in vain to see it in other cities during my travels, but was always thwarted by logistical impediments. That morning, the Science Museum staff kindly waved me and the other volunteers through the door into the 10 a.m. showing, free of charge. Don Burgess and Terra Thompson gave a brief introduction to the film before the lights went down. At the end, they did a Q & A, while we resumed our posts by our respective trucks, ready to answer questions. I parked down at the far end of the line, so I asked David B. to spin the RaXPol antenna periodically to draw people down my way. Former officemate Jeff S. joined me for part of the afternoon to help answer questions and talk about some of the data he collected in the 24 May 2011 tornadoes. And questions were plentiful; we had steady foot traffic of all ages, all day long.

Here’s my review of the film.

Tornado Alley is billed as Sean Casey’s magnum opus, the culmination of eight years of film-gathering in his Tornado Intercept Vehicle (“the TIV”). The film was partially sponsored by the National Science Foundation, who also sponsored VORTEX2. In the film, VORTEX2 mainly serves to provide a parallel story to that of the TIV crew, and that story is heavily CSWR-centric.*

Starting with the whale’s mouth swallowing the audience at the opening, Tornado Alley delivers the spectacular visuals that I’ve come to expect from IMAX. The filmmakers pack plenty of “torn porn” into 45 minutes. We see every frame of tornado footage they’ve got, and happily, they let the audience soak it in for 10-15 rapturous seconds before cutting back to the story. There’s a shot of a multi-vortex tornado that, in and of itself, is worth the price of admission. The IMAX format comes closest to capturing the all-encompassing experience of seeing a real tornado, minus the hours of driving, the bad food, and lightning danger.

However, the narrative is a mess. The filmmakers try to squish together eight years’ worth of footage on the TIV side to parallel two years’ worth on the VORTEX2 side. I spotted tornadoes from 2004 through 2008 being passed off as tornadoes from 2009 and 2010. Goshen Co., WY makes an appearance a few moments after the 9 June 2005 Stockton, KS twins. (I was there. I even have video of the TIV turning down the road from which they got their shot.)

With regards to the science, the film punches far below its weight, especially so considering that it’s an NSF-funded excursion. We get a few minutes’ explanation of how a supercell, and then a tornado, form. They don’t quite dumb it down to the clichéd, “cold air mass + warm air mass = tornado.” But it’s not much better than that, not to mention that the animations accompanying the explanations look relatively crude for 2011. There’s almost no attempt to tie this rudimentary understanding to the story. At one point, Bill Paxton announces, “Sean Casey has picked the wrong storm.” In my mind, I immediately cried out, “Okay, why is it the wrong storm?” But hungry minds like mine are left wanting. The narrative is so jumbled that I can’t figure out what day it actually was. I can’t even go back into my own chase logs and look it up.

The climax of the film is supposed to be Sean Casey capturing IMAX film from inside a tornado. “The Shot” turns out to be a bit of a let-down, but I can’t say I was surprised. Every serendipitous film or video I’ve seen from inside a tornado has shown blinding rain, flying leaves and branches, and not much else. There’s no glorious, Twister-esque view up the tornado’s throat, no choral accompaniment, no dancing lightning bolts, no maelstrom of recognizable debris. I left as convinced as ever that there’s no point, visually, to driving into a tornado, because there’s nothing to see there. (In fact, I’m starting to think that Mr. Will Keller may have been full of it.)

To sum up, Tornado Alley contains a few truly delectable tornado morsels. But at the end of the film, I felt like I’d eaten a single buffet plate, not a three-course meal.

*Just in case you’re wondering: I’m not in it. The IMAX crew took one shot of my team in hurry-up-and-wait mode at a park in Kimball, NE, in 2010, but that shot didn’t make the final cut. The big group drive-by shot also cuts in just after Team Howie is out of frame. Drat!

Yesterday, I closed out the year in which I earned my Ph.D., and in which the atmosphere reminded meteorological community, via new records for tornadoes and also tornado fatalities, that it still has a great deal to teach us.

Let’s face it, it’s winter, and there’s not much going on, severe weather-wise. The only new thing you’ll find here is a Favorite Links page (accessible via a tab above) that I finally got around to assembling. When I checked up on my fellow chasers’ blogs to make sure the links were still active, I found that many hadn’t been updated since early November 2011 (immediately after the Tipton / Wichita Mountains / Ft. Cobb tornado day), so I don’t feel too bad.

In truth, my last two months’ worth of writing energy was expended producing two manuscripts. However, I have numerous ideas for blog posts rolling around in my head. I’m planning a series of posts about peer review, along with a book review or two. And, of course, I eagerly await the meteorological smorgasbord and explorations that 2012 will surely bring!