I Hate Ice

Don't get me wrong, frozen forms of precipitation are good for some things especially when this frozen precipitation falls in the form of big fluffy flakes. Snow is wonderful because without it we wouldn't be able to enjoy skiing, snowmen, snow caves (something I have YET to be able to do), snow cones, or snow angels. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the large form of frozen precipitation; hail. This is a bit more dangerous as anything larger than dimes can cause some serious problems. Yes, ask any cotton or corn farmer in the Llano Estacado or the portion of the High Plains in the Panhandles and you will hear them say dime size hail can ruin a crop through the seedling stages. Then you get the big end of hail, the softball to holy-crap-it-is-punching-holes-in-the-roof which doesn't care about whether the material under it's fall is man-made or a part of nature. Typically, the monstrous hail falls with severe thunderstorms as strong updrafts are needed to support large hailstone formation which is a whole different realm of mother nature...

However, there is tiny range of frozen precipitation that I personally cannot stand. This often arrives in forms varying from a fine mist/fog/drizzle that occurs with temperatures below freezing, or when the temperatures profiles in the atmosphere favors sleet (properly coded as ice pellets), and the worst of all: freezing rain. My personal dislike for these hellacious forms of precipitation rise from the fact that there is little a city can do to lessen the impacts from various problems that arise (slick roadways, downed power lines, etc. since this accumulates and cannot be plowed away like snow) and it turns my normally easy 5 minute drive to work into a 15 minute, stress-inducing, profanity laced ordeal. Likewise, any form of winter weather warning/advisory that goes out induces a sense of mass hysteria among the residents and thus a run on local grocery stores ensues. It is as if people believe they will run out of bread and milk (and for those of the college age in this town - beer) in the 3 days of wintry precipitation and they have to hoard as much as they can. Store shelves and coolers are picked clean of the essentials and the stress and profanity move indoors as impatient people try to rush through the line in order to get home before the arrival of the end-of-the-world, cataclysmic, biblical end times winter weather.

Sidebar - In my town, a fair amount of people have "so called" 4x4/four-wheel drive/all-wheel drive vehicles and the majority of these are in the pickup/truck form. I say "so called" because 90% of these vehicles are in reality 2-wheel drive thanks to open differentials, another 8% are "2.5" wheel drive thanks to limited slip diffs, with another 1% some combination of open/limited slip/locked differentials yielding a "3" wheel drive. Finally rounding out the group is the 1% that have "true" four-wheel drive where both the front and rear differentials are "locked". (Note: all percentages are wild a$$ guesses). My pickup right now is a 2.5 wheel drive (open front, limited slip rear) while the Jeep is a true 4x4, locked front and rear but I digress.

My point is that via personal observation, the people around here assume 4x4/four-wheel/all-wheel drive means "damn the road conditions, I can drive the speed limit because I'm in a 4x4!". This lack of understanding in their vehicle plus an apparent tendency for people to generally disregard traffic rules (and common sense) yields a portion of the population who are a greater danger to the rest of the residents. The drive in both yesterday and this morning was spent watching out for everyone else and avoiding those fishtailing down the major roads while I plugged along at what I felt was a personally safe pace (25 in a 45 isn't too bad...). However, I was mildly humored with the expressions on the faces of people who had experienced temporary loss of vehicular control...some of whom probably needed to go home and change their pants.

Unfortunately, the hardest part happens while I am at work. Forecasting wintry precipitation in this neck-of-the-woods is part skill but majority luck. A difference in 100 miles can mean the difference between the fluffy stuff or the scrape half an inch of ice off the windshield stuff. In some cases (such as Tuesday), a 25 mile distance can mean the difference between flurries and accumulating sleet. Although my gut instinct is that the majority of the population could care less about our forecasts, there is at least a small minority that does check our forecasts and it is for those people I am trying to figure out what can happen. Walking into the forecast desk Monday was nothing but utter stress and chaos; phone ringing, hand analysis to do, a quick glance at the incoming forecast models, and then a decision on what kind of product to issue 3 hours into the shift to start the aforementioned mass hysteria in the general public. When I walked out the door at 4:30 pm, I ached from the stress of trying to forecast frozen hell falling from the sky and from trying to see the microscale features in the data that could make or break the forecast.

I can handle stress; convective severe weather events are a yearly reminder of that. Yeah I might have a few more gray hairs mixed in with whatever hasn't decided to fall out, I might develop a stomach ulcer or two from drinking too much caffeine (a la 2007 severe weather season in the Top 'o Tejas) during a prolonged period of active weather, and I might pass out for 24 hours when I need to catch up on sleep. However, the stress during convective events is of a different variety than in this icy hell. Severe weather usually lasts for a brief window whereas wintry precipitation can continue for days on end. Give me 12 hours of tornadoes, hail, lightning, winds, and flooding compared to 72 hours of sub-freezing, whiteout inducing, slip and sliding crap.

Give me 3 feet of snow and not this eigth-inch of ice that coats every surface. Let me plow through powdery bliss in my Jeep and not play a game of ice capade chicken on the roads. Did I mention it is going to be 55 degrees today??? All my troubles will literally melt away...

A Disappearing Art in the Science of Meteorology

I was blown away when I realized that this year marks 10 years since I graduated from college with a hard-earned degree in Meteorology. To make me feel even older; I realized that this summer will also mark 15 years with "The Bureau" (unfortunately the first 4 of which apparently don't count towards my retirement date). When I first started back in 1994, the state of The Bureau was considerably different; PCs were just entering the scene, we were still using a computer system known as AFOS that was designed by Ford Aerospace and was VERY finicky, and the NEXRAD radar had just entered the scene. The majority of the weather analysis was done with the MK I eyeball, an assortment of colored pencils, basic printouts on a facsimile printer which could result in a bit of a buzz due to the ink used, and an occasional walk to the window to see what was going on outside right now.

Meteorology is a science but within the science is something that has a bit of artistic value. Our depiction of weather conditions at the surface and at various levels in the atmosphere was and can still be created by doing hand analysis. This involves looking at a "standard plot" of surface data and contouring the important parameters; pressure, temperature, and dewpoint. Other parameters such as 3-hourly pressure change can be plotted as well. Finally frontal positions can be derived from the data and contours. Likewise, analysis of upper-air data reveals information about the structure and layout of parameters at given levels at the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, hand analysis is a dying artform within our science. It has rapidly been supplanted by computerized objective analysis as hand analysis can take considerably longer than a computer chomping through the data. Although quality checks of the data are improving and have aided in the accuracy of an computer analysis, there are still times a bad observation/data point can sneak through and blow the objective analysis out of the water. It boggles my mind to think that there are generations of meteorologists coming out of various programs in the U.S. that are no longer teaching such a basic form of weather forecasting. They are taught to trust the computer analysis and use the "extra" time for outreach, teletraining sessions, or the generic "professional development".

I didn't realize how rampant this problem was until I had an intern walk up to me while I was working on a hand analysis of surface and upper-air data. He asked why I was wasting my time drawing with colored pencils when the computer version was already done and available. My response was with my own series of questions, which I will also now pose to other "young'uns" who might be reading this. Let's say AWIPS systems are down and the only thing you have access to is the internet. I will not pose the most difficult scenario of having to download all the raw observations and make your own surface map, but say that the only sites you can access are those which have the data pre-plotted on their standard models. Would you be able to create a short-term/12 hour forecast based on that data alone? The reply I got was a rambling statement of how the scenario I posed was highly unlikely and that we could always call another office to get the forecast we needed, blah, blah, blah...all to keep from having to admit that he had no clue nor interest on how to do a basic hand analysis.

Call me "old school". Hand analysis is one of the easiest ways for a meteorologist to get a feel for the basic state of the atmosphere and what might happen in the next few hours. A detailed hand analysis can also reveal subtle features that the models might miss by getting their first guess of conditions (known as model initialization) wrong. With almost 15 years of perusing data via hand analysis, certain features start to appear which is known as pattern recognition; current maps reflect a pattern seen with previous weather systems which means the potential exists for the same kind of weather event to unfold. I would venture to say that combining a firm grasp of what is going on currently plus the various forecast models (computer simulations) of what the weather might be can result in a MUCH better forecast in the first 24 hours than looking at a computer model alone.

So, to my mentors from our collective time at the Bureau office in the northern part of the western Metromess; my sincerest thanks for establishing a firm foot in that wonderful art of hand analysis. Al Moller, your retirement is a great loss for the younger meteorologists coming into the Bureau as your guidance in my early stages of learning hand analysis were priceless. My thanks also go to the late Dr. Dusan Djuric, my METR451 instructor who required map analysis and discussion at the start of every lab day and for his textbook which covers the basics of hand analysis as well as more complex items. All those countless days with various colors rubbed onto the palm of my drawing hand and discussion of what those maps showed have helped me perform the most basic part of my job through all these years; forecasting the weather. To all you young'uns who think it is a waste of time - you are only as good of a meteorologist as you make yourself to be. Take the time to learn hand analysis; it will help you out more than you know...