Sax and Wedge: Maybe This Year

This afternoon I have a gig with Paul Lesinski at the Amway Grand. I’m looking forward to it, but it indisposes me to chase what could be Michigan’s first round of severe weather this afternoon. Practically speaking, the “storm” and “horn” parts of Stormhorn sometimes conflict with each other. I can’t do two things at once; I can’t play a gig and chase storms, and when I post here about one subject, then the other half of my readership gets left out.

Yet I view the two interests as connected in spirit, to such an extent that one of my life goals is to get some footage and/or photos of me playing my sax out on the Plains with a big wedge churning in the background. Given how active this April has been, maybe 2011 will be the year when I fulfill that ambition. I almost always bring my horn with me on my long-distance chases for just that reason (plus, yeah, I like to get in some sax practice when I can). The one notable occasion when I left it home last year was on May 22, a milemarker in my chase career. Unfortunately, the vehicle was so packed that there was no room for the horn, and given how events unfolded out there by Roscoe, it was probably just as well.

Today my buddy Bill is chasing down in Arkansas. Yesterday he filmed a large, violent wedge that hit the town of Vilonia. Round two today looks to be at least as bad, and I hope Bill stays safe. I don’t have a good feeling about what lies in store for the folks in that region. But I won’t be following any of the developments because I’ll be doing the other thing I love as much as storm chasing: playing my saxophone. This time of year the storm chaser in me has the edge over the musician, but once I’ve got my horn in my hands I forget everything else and just go with the flow of the music. Playing jazz is one of the most in-the-moment experiences a person can have, and I get tremendous satisfaction out of being a practitioner.

Afterwards maybe I’ll still get a crack at whatever weather shapes up. Probably not; today, such as it is, looks like it’ll play out on the eastern side of the state.  But I’ll take my gear with me to the gig just in case.

Storm Chasing for TV 8: Taking It to the Next Level

I met this afternoon with WOOD TV 8 meteorologists Kyle Underwood and Matt Kirkwood to discuss chasing storms for TV 8. I’m excited about the prospect of taking what has hitherto been a longstanding hobby of mine, albeit one of passionate focus, and upgrading it to the semi-professional level.

When Ben Holcomb left Michigan last year for the grand storm chaser’s Mecca of Oklahoma, he offered to hook up several of his Troll compatriots with TV 8 to fill his vacancy. One of those chasers was me. At the time, gracious as Ben’s offer was, I nevertheless felt I had to decline due to a pathetic lack of equipment. But the thought of the opportunity kept nagging at me, so I finally decided to take a chance and purchase some stuff I really can’t afford out of the sense that I can’t afford NOT to do so. My gut instinct, which I hope is right, is that my investment will pay for itself over the storm season. Thus, motivated by the possibility of having my avocation become self-sustaining, with tax writeoffs on mileage and expenses as an added incentive, I dropped a healthy chunk of cash on the following items:

  • ♦ Panasonic HDC-TM700 video camera with 32 gig internal memory
  • ♦ 32 gig HDSC memory card
  • ♦ Logitech Pro 9000 webcam for live streaming video

The cash outlay is not one I take lightly at a time when my money is tight. It’s a good barometer of how seriously I take storm chasing. But after speaking with Kyle, I’m impressed that WOOD TV appears, on its part, to be equally serious about developing a topnotch crew of local chasers. Commitment matched with commitment is a good thing.

Besides my purchase of equipment, over the past few weeks I’ve also invested a good amount of my time and a bit more cash studying for my HAM radio test, which I took and passed last Friday. Today I finally found my new call letters in the FCC list, so I’m now officially good to go as a HAM operator.

Additionally, per Lisa’s recommendation, I’ve registered with Vimeo, and after giving it an introductory look-over, I feel good about that resource as an online video repository. Vimeo should allow me to start embedding my footage in future Stormhorn.com blog posts, and it may also serve as an easy way to make my material accessible to WOOD TV.

All that now remains to be done is to sign up with Chaser TV and start getting familiar with the live streaming video. That and familiarize myself with Vimeo and its capabilities. I’ve got a bit of a learning curve ahead of me between now and April 1, when WOOD TV hopes to begin tapping into its chaser pool.

Since all the chasers in that pool know each other–it’s a small, connected community, as I’m sure storm chasers anywhere will understand–there’s the potential for some decent synergy on a chase day. What one man misses, another is likely to catch.

So…a new experience lies ahead for 2011. No way am I missing big weather when it shapes up out west in Tornado Alley. But if statistics mean anything, this year’s La Nina could bring a bonanza of severe weather closer to home, even to my back door of West Michigan. When it does, I’ll be on it, dashcam streaming and camcorder a-blazin’.

Preparing for Chase Season 2011

Last night I pulled the trigger on a new Panasonic HDC-TM700 camcorder from B&H. I feel a bit of angst in saying this as I’m not in a position where I can easily afford the $750 this pooch is costing me. But neither can I afford to pass up the opportunity to do some chasing for local media, and I’m hoping that this year will furnish enough action that the camera will pay for itself fairly quickly. The old adage, “It takes money to make money,” applies here.

The Panny is a lot of camcorder for the money, too. It has gotten consistently rave reviews. And my buddy Ben Holcomb, who does some great work, has been absolutely delighted with his TM300, which is the predecessor to the model I’ve ordered.

Besides storm chasing, I can also use the camera to make video clips of my sax playing. That will greatly enhance my ability to publicize myself. So, all things considered, I’m telling myself that I’ve made a good investment at a time when money is tight.

With the new camcorder on the way, a HAM radio license is also in the works. For the past two weeks I’ve been studying using Ham Test Online, and this Friday evening I’ll be heading to the Red Cross building in Grand Rapids to take the test. I don’t know why it has taken me this long. I plunked down my $24.95 for the 2-year study subscription over a year ago, and then I procrastinated and procrastinated. Finally a switch flipped in me, though, and I moved from indifference to saturating myself in the HAM material with nigh-obsessive focus. With added incentive from my friend Duane of a free hand-held unit, I’m ready to rumble this Friday and will soon have a valuable new communication tool for storm chasing this spring.

Still to do: get a dash mount and maybe an el-cheapo, used camcorder to go with it. Register for live chasing with Chaser TV. And that’s about it. At last, after all these years, I’ll finally be equipped with everything I needed to not only chase successfully, but also record my chases with good video and still images.

Now if we can just get some storms!

Guest Post: Roger Edwards Looks at the High Cost of Indiscriminate Budget Slashing in Public Safety

Roger Edwards is a great guy–a Dallas Cowboy fan, family man, writer, photographer, and down-to-earth Renaissance man. He’s also a name anyone involved in storm chasing is either quite familiar with or else ought to be. When the man talks about severe weather, his words pack the clout of not only a veteran chaser, but also one of today’s foremost authorities on his subject.

With his wife, Elke, Roger maintains an engaging online presence in their blogs Stormeyes and Weather or Not, as well as in the scholarly Electronic Journal of Severe Storms Meteorology. Besides being a prominent weather scientist and forecasting expert, Roger is also a deep thinker and a superb writer whose passion for the world around him colors his words. I’m delighted and honored to feature him as my guest. Given free rein to expound on whatever topic was hot upon him, Roger took a direction I didn’t expect. His message is a timely one that speaks not only to all those of us who, like Roger, “feast on the smorgasbord of atmospheric violence,” but also to everyone–and “everyone” here means everyone–who is impacted by services of our government that are essential to public safety and health.

There, Roger–how’s that for an introduction? Now I’ll shut up and let you take the microphone.

Protection of Life and Property: The Necessary Government Role

By Roger Edwards

I am writing not as a government employee tasked with protection of life and property through severe storm forecasts. Nor am I writing as a member of an employees’ union that is publicizing the most draconian possibilities, as whispered to them by an inner sanctum of upper management (who, unlike the union, can’t legally lobby).

Instead, I type on my own behalf as a taxpayer and private citizen who just happens to be intimately familiar on a personal level with the front-line impacts of some asinine and infantile political posturing that’s happening right now in Washington, DC.

Disagreement on how to finish paying for the rest of this fiscal year threatens either a shutdown of “non-essentials” or a budget that slices the daylights out of many that are both essential and not. “Essential” means law enforcement, military, utilities, storm forecasting, air-traffic control, prisons, border patrol, and other such activities that directly affect public safety and that aren’t necessarily 9-to-5 day jobs. Essential employees are not paid during a shutdown, but are required to report to work as “emergency” personnel. I am included in that, as part of a 24/7/365 storm-forecasting group.

The most extreme budget scenarios for the rest of fiscal 2011 (through October) could result in rolling closure of both warning offices and national forecasting centers, along with unpaid furloughs lasting weeks at a time. That would be insane, headed into both peak tornado and hurricane seasons. What a crappy, backhanded “reward” for the dedication and effort that severe weather and hurricane forecasters devote every day and night…all day, all night. (Don’t worry, I never would resort to faking illness like those lying liars in Wisconsin…I actually am honest, and care too much about my duty!)

Politicians of both parties, in their zeal (and however noble the principles) are ignorantly unaware of the truth that not all government is equally useful, and that the most valuable and necessary government functions are those that protect life and property…period! In any democratic (lower-case “d”) system, all else is secondary to public safety as a responsibility of a government.

Here’s the ugly reality: Those life-saving functions that mean the most are typically small and focused, scattered and buried throughout numerous much bigger agencies full of bloat. In the tangled mess of government bureaucracy, the needed is interwoven with the unneeded, the important with the optional, the efficient with the wasteful–sometimes very tightly! You can argue that it’s partly by design, in order to use the lifesaving functions as human shields against elimination of the wasteful rubbish. I’ll fully grant that it could be a valid argument and a tactic used by some politicians to protect sacred pork.

But it’s still reality. To remove the unnecessary areas in shrinking big government is a good thing, done very selectively. But most elected officials don’t understand this and try to engage in shortsighted slashing that throws babies out with bathwater.

Meanwhile, as in the current standoff over a looming “shutdown,” those government employees engaged in protection of life and property are used as pawns for show. It’s a dirty, rotten, slimy game of political brinkmanship brought about by the shortsighted spending practices of Congresses and administrations of both parties, past and present.

Such childish foolishness, purely for the sake of posturing, cuts the meat and bone under the fat. It’s happened before, it’s nothing new, and it’s ridiculous. The strategy: Threaten to cut the visible, necessary stuff–like storm forecasting, air-traffic control, meat inspection, border security, law enforcement, anti-terror and such–to cover for fiscal irresponsibility on the unnecessary rubbish. It is a time-honed ploy, definitely bad for the country, and speaks to the immaturity and ignorance of politicians in general.

Does fiscal austerity need to happen? Absolutely! Liberals as a whole, and fiscally liberal Republicans, cannot bury their heads in the sand anymore and ignore the national debt. Think of the less-than-worst scenarios that may result as short-term pain for long-term gain.

Public debt is out of control. That’s an overwhelming national consensus. We all need to make sacrifices to cover for past and current fiscal irresponsibility by politicians of all parties. I support smart, targeted cutting of government, starting with the fat.

Notice that I have not complained about the salary freeze, which includes my own. It’s only fair that all government employees sacrifice some. If I now can’t buy a new violin for my daughter in orchestra because the family budget needs to be tightened, because it’s better for the country…it’s unfortunate, but that’s life. Others are far worse off!

Answer this, however: Do politicians have a history of smart, targeted streamlining of swollen government? Do politicians have a track record of taking intelligent, careful time and consideration, or do they instead resort to short-fused, publicity-grabbing, slash-and-burn, one-size-fits-all grandstanding?

To answer that, watch the news and read the stories today, where Democrats blame Republicans, Republicans are blaming Democrats and each other, and back-and-forth grandstanding commands the press. Then think back to past government “shutdowns” such as that at the end of 1995 and early 1996, or 1990 (each of which happened since I’ve been involved). Republicans or Democrats in the Presidency, Republicans or Democrats in Congress, none are blameless in the sort of showboating and lack of foresight that allows the federal budget sickness to get this far.

I’m here to tell you that life-saving functions must not be chopped. That includes storm forecasting.

Consider both sides of this coin.

Five cents. This gleaming little Jefferson is about how much NOAA (which includes the National Weather Service) costs each of us taxpayers each day. Some of that involves all the people and machines that enable forecasts of both dangerous and calm weather. Some of NOAA admittedly involves top-heavy layers of management and bureaucracy above the front-line workers. Much of those are glad-handing, paper-pushing, suit-and-tie roles that I see as not absolutely necessary, and that could and should be trimmed. Yet when those very bureaucrats are ordered to make recommendations for cuts, do you think they will be targeting their own jobs? If you do, I’ve got land about a hundred miles south of New Orleans to sell you.

Life-saving nickels are being swept off the pavement right in front of an out-of-control dump truck overflowing with borrowed zillion-dollar bills, representing entitlements and other giant-scale spending that needs to be braked first. Politicians generally don’t have the courage to do that, nor the understanding to thoughtfully focus merit-based cuts elsewhere. The chopping devolves into a blind, mindless, one-size-fits-all exercise; hence, we must take the bad with the good, the inefficient with the necessary, hoping someone with patience and courage eventually conducts a long, careful, well-informed, and elaborate trim inside each bureaucracy with a very fine and efficient surgical knife.

Ask yourself something more: Are national and local severe storm outlooks, tornado watches and warnings, hurricane watches and warnings, winter storm watches and warnings, and every other daily forecast, worth five cents? You decide. And if you say yes, tell your elected officials in no uncertain terms.

===== Roger Edwards =====
American taxpayer and
severe weather scientist

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night, But the Band Played On

Happy New Year! Last year was tough but we made it through, didn’t we. I hope that 2011 will be a good year for you, for me, for us all.

Yeesh, I’m starting to talk like Tiny Tim. I’d better get on with this post, which is a summary of yesterday. Weatherwise, the last day of 2010 was a humdinger for convective connoisseurs, and jazz-wise, it was a fun evening for yours truly. While the two topics may seem unrelated, they are in fact integrally connected. It’s a well-known fact among my storm chasing buddies that any time I commit myself to a gig and am therefore unable to chase, tornadoes will drop out of the sky like confetti at a gala event. It’s a gift I have. Statistically, my powers hit their zenith the weekend of the Grand Rapids Festival of the Arts in early June. But anytime of the year, all hell is liable to break loose when I’m booked to play somewhere.

Yesterday was a prime case in point. While Steve Durst and I played a thoroughly enjoyable piano-sax gig for the dinner crowd at the Cobblestone Bistro here in Caledonia, tornadoes mowed across Missouri, Illinois, and Mississippi. You could see the event shaping up earlier in the week, with forecast models depicting a potent longwave trough digging deep into the nation’s midsection on Friday; a surface low working its way northward through Missouri and Iowa; high-velocity mid- and upper-level jets generating massive shear; and, critically, a long and broad plume of unseasonably rich moisture juicing the atmosphere up into Illinois ahead of an advancing cold front.

If you want to get some great insights into yesterday’s setup compared with two other similar wintertime severe weather events, check out this superb article by Adam Lucio in Convective Addiction. Adam’s analysis was spot-on. Tornadoes began spinning up early yesterday morning in Oklahoma and Arkansas and continued on through the day in Missouri and Illinois, surprisingly far north. Rolla and Saint Louis, Missouri, got whacked pretty solidly. Later, as expected, the action shifted south, with severe storms firing in Louisiana and a batch of night-time tornadoes gnawing their way across central Mississippi. Yazoo City found itself in the crosshairs for the third time this year as a strong radar couplet grazed past it, but, mercifully, this time the town appears to have escaped yet another direct hit.

With yesterday’s dust finally settled, the SPC’s present tally shows 40 preliminary tornado reports. Sadly, there were some fatalities, not all of which the reports show. What an awful way for the families affected to end a year that has already been difficult enough for so many people.

And the show isn’t quite over. Today, on the first day of 2011, Tornado Watch #3 is in effect for the Florida panhandle and southern Alabama. If that’s any kind of augur for this year’s severe weather season, April through June could be an interesting time for storm chasers.

But enough about the weather already. Let’s talk about jazz.

The Cobblestone Bistro is a beautiful place to play. I can’t believe that something like it exists in Caledonia, a community not exactly renowned as either a jazz hot spot or a north star of destination dining. But here the bistro is, fully operational now that a long-forthcoming liquor license has put its winsome and comfortable bar in business, and with an owner who appreciates and supports live jazz.

Last night I played my first gig at the Cobblestone for the New Years Eve dinner crowd from 6:00-10:00 p.m. Steve Durst joined me on the keyboards, and we spent an enjoyable four hours playing jazz standards in as elegant and ambiance-rich a setting as you could hope to find.

In a restaurant, particularly in a smaller room, it’s important not to play too loudly. People want to talk, and the music needs to add to the mood, not subtract from it by being too intrusive. That can be tricky for a sax player. A saxophone is not by nature a shy, quiet instrument, and a lot of energy is required to play it softly. But with three tables positioned directly in front of Steve and me, both of us absolutely had to reign in our volume.

Evidently we succeeded. We got no complaints of playing too loudly, but we did get some very nice compliments on our sound.

I’ll be playing at the Cobblestone again next Saturday, January 8, from 6:30-9:30 p.m. with Dave DeVos on bass and Paul Lesinski on keyboards. The trio will be playing as well on the 15th and 22nd, with Steve occupying the keyboard seat on the 15th. If you’re looking for a great night out in a beautiful setting, come and check us out.

And with that, I’m signing off and getting this first afternoon of a brand new year underway. I wish you a very happy and prosperous 2011.

–Storm (aka Bob)

So You Want to Be a Storm Chaser

The long months are here for storm chasers. Winter, the season of convective inactivity. The time some of us love but most of us simply endure. Three months–four, really–lie between now and our favorite time of year when the spring storm season begins to ramp up.

These are not idle months, though, or at least, they shouldn’t be. Now is the time for chasers to be cracking the books, reading papers, doing what they can to hone their forecasting skills. One great tool for achieving that objective has been the chase cases on Stormtrack.

For those not familiar with them, the chase cases are a user-based initiative in which, for a given case, a forum member volunteers to supply suites of data commonly used by chasers to pinpoint their targets. The data is typically gleaned from NOAA archives of actual weather events, with the first batch of maps, soundings, radar, satellite images, and SPC text products usually time-stamped 00Z on the night before the event. Chasers consult the data and determine their initial staging areas, then adjust their positions as subsequent forecast suites are released over time. A typical chase case can take three days or more to complete, depending on how busy the person supplying the data is.

At the end of it all, the players get to check their positions with the final radar images and storm reports and determine how they fared. Since these virtual scenarios are based on actual severe weather events that include verified tornadoes, the value of the chase cases is obvious. Besides being just plain fun, they allow participants to compare notes with what others are noticing in the forecasting tools and how they’re interpreting that information. They really help a person sharpen the razor during the snowy season.

Chase case number 5 ended last night. A northwest flow event, it was a tough nut to crack, and a lot of people busted, including me. At one point, six of us selected Woodward, Oklahoma, as a place to hang out under a boundary. It was a virtual chaser convergence, one of several that occurred on this case, and it got me to thinking. Forty-four people participated in case number 5–not many, given the vastness of the territory actually involved; yet many of us wound up clustering in the same places and wound up on the same storms. My question: What fraction of actual chasers out on a real chase day did we represent? In real life, given a major chase event, you can bet that the number of people pursuing storms would far outstrip forty-four.

It’s no secret that the hordes are increasing rapidly every year. Thanks to media shows such as Discovery Channel’s highly popular Storm Chasers series, what used to be a pretty solitary activity practiced by a relative handful has spiraled into a circus out on the Great Plains. Today it seems like everybody under the age of 30 wants to be a storm chaser, or at least, they think they do.

Far be it from me to separate between a host of yahoos who mistake opportunistic lunacy for the art and science of chasing storms, versus the far fewer individuals whose interest is rooted in something more trustworthy than reality TV. It’s your right to chase storms if you want to, and everybody has to start somewhere. Shoot, I’ve been chasing for coming up on 15 years now, and I still consider myself rather green. Number of years doesn’t automatically translate into expertise. Nevertheless, I’ve seen enough to have formed some opinions about where storm chasing seems to be headed as more and more new blood flocks to Tornado Alley. To those of you who, inspired by what you’ve seen on television, plan on heading to the Plains for the first time this coming spring, I have this to say:

Don’t be an idiot.

I mean it. I’m not saying don’t go. I’m saying, before you go, learn about what it is that you’re getting into. There’s more to it than you realize, and if your knowledge thus far comes from watching a TV series or a handful of YouTube videos, then honestly, you don’t know jack.

Start with this thought: Storm chasing is not about getting as close as you can to a tornado. “Extreme chasing” is a fairly new phenomenon that has been glorified by the media to the point where it has, in impressionable minds, set a new and dangerous standard. But it’s not the historical norm. The reality is, most veteran chasers have generally maintained a safe distance from tornadoes. So banish any images of driving to within 100 feet of a tornado. Hello? It’s a freaking TORNADO. And you’re not Reed Timmer or Tim Samaras. Those guys have knowledge and experience you can’t even imagine, and what you’ve seen of them on TV has been just one highly condensed, scripted, edited, incomplete, and not altogether accurate part of a much bigger picture. Trying to shortcut what is in fact a pretty involved learning curve could easily get you killed or maimed for life.

Getting close to tornadoes is just one style of chasing. I have friends who practice it; it’s a choice they make based on their level of experience and situational awareness, which I respect, and I’m not going to knock them for it. They know the risks. For that matter, I’ve been pretty close myself on a few occasions, not always by choice. Every storm is different. In general, though, keeping a good mile or more between you and a tornado isn’t wimpy, it’s smart.

Enough about that. Here’s my next bit of advice: Respect others who are on the road, and respect locals whose lives can be impacted both by the weather and by your own actions. Chasing a storm doesn’t accord you some sort of elite status to which traffic laws don’t apply. Parking your car in the middle of a traffic lane in order to take pictures of a storm is selfish, inexcusable behavior; either find a damn turnoff or else keep moving until you locate a place where you can pull over onto the shoulder. And driving 30 miles an hour over the speed limit endangers not only you, but others as well, particularly in a rainy storm environment where hydroplaning is a real danger. Last May in South Dakota a bunch of chasers, including me, had to deal with a very pissed-off sheriff whose attitude toward us had been provoked several hours prior by a chaser who blasted past him at 90 miles an hour. The sheriff was preoccupied at the time; otherwise he’d have busted the guy. As it stood, one thoughtless driver gave that LEO a bad impression of chasers in general, and he took his anger out on us. So remember, you don’t own the road. And no, being a rugged, individualistic American citizen doesn’t give you the right to conduct yourself in ways that negatively affect other people.

I could probably have lumped both of my preceding points together by saying, educate yourself and use common sense. First and foremost, learn about storm structure and morphology. Discard any high-octane media images you may have of storm chasing and instead find out what it takes to chase safely and successfully. I highly recommend West Texas storm chaser Jason Boggs’ educational resource site–it’s a gold mine of information. So are severe weather forecasting guru Tim Vasquez’s books, available through his business, Weather Graphics. If you can only afford one book, get The Storm Chasing Handbook. It’s a great introduction to the nuts and bolts of chasing storms.

Storm chasing is an incredible avocation with rewards that extend beyond the beauty and drama of the atmosphere to other dimensions, aesthetic, intellectual, interpersonal, and spiritual. But by its very nature, chasing storms is also a potentially dangerous activity. If you’re going to take it up, the smartest way to go about it is to exercise humility and restraint, and to make learning your priority rather than an adrenaline rush. Pursue that first objective and the second will come in due time.

Be safe. Be smart. Be courteous. The Plains have gotten smaller and more crowded in recent years. How you conduct yourself on them, and the attitude you display, makes a difference for everyone.

MetEd: A Fantastic Self-Educational Approach for Learning Weather Forecasting

When I first began turning my lifelong fascination with tornadoes into an active passion for storm chasing over 14 years ago, I started with the essentials of storm structure. Then I began learning such arcane terms as CAPE, shear, dewpoints, helicity, and so forth, over time piecing together how the different ingredients interact. Bit by bit, the alchemy of the atmosphere–depicted by surface maps, forecast models, skew-T/log-P diagrams, hodographs, station obs, satellite, radar, and other mystifying tools of the trade–began to make sense to me. Tremblingly, nervously, with a deep sense of my woeful lack of knowledge, I began to try my hand at forecasting–and darned if I didn’t start to make some good calls.

Slowly I learned, and I’m still learning. There’s so much to know, and I want to know as much as I can in order to more accurately determine whether there will be tornadoes, and where, and at what time, and whether a weather scenario will be significant enough to warrant the long drive from Michigan to wherever the storms will be firing.

I wish I’d had a mentor to help me learn this stuff. Thank goodness for the community on Stormtrack–for the many experienced chasers and meteorologists who have generously answered my questions and shared their knowledge over the years! Fortunately for new chasers, a wealth of educational resources exists today that can make the learning curve quicker and less frustrating.

And that brings me to MetEd

I just completed a MetEd satellite interpretation module on vorticity maximas and comma clouds. The material has both enlightened me and kicked my butt. I’ve learned enough to know that I’ve got a lot to learn, but also enough to make better use of water vapor imagery. Now I’m moving on to vorticity minimas, but after finishing the first module I had to just back away for the evening and take a breather. This stuff may seem simple to some, but it makes me want to find a nice hard surface and bonk my head against it. I get the concepts, but working them out in real-life case studies is something else. What gives me incentive is the payoff of becoming a better forecaster. MetEd offers some fantastic tools for pursuing that goal.

Short of a formal education in meteorology, MetEd online courses are probably the best thing going for those who want to acquire basic forecasting skills or expand the skills they’ve already got. I recommend them highly. A program of UCAR (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research), MetEd is no lightweight survey. It’s a constantly growing and evolving suite of vanguard educational products covering a broad sweep of meteorological topics, and it is used by scores of operational forecasters to help them sharpen their blades. Predictably, some of what it offers is well beyond the grasp of most lay persons. Yet a fair amount is accessible to the motivated self-educator, and well worth the time it takes to absorb the material.

The course I’m working on, Dynamic Feature Identification: The Satellite Palette, is a good example. Its interactive format lets you get your hands dirty with actual application as you learn about vort maxes, vort minimas, comma clouds, deformation zones, blocking patterns, and more. Once I’ve completed the full course, while I’ll assuredly be no expert at interpreting water vapor imagery, I’ll nevertheless have gained some knowledge that will serve me well–stuff I’ll be able to use next spring when Big Weather returns to the Great Plains.

If you want to bone up on weather forecasting of any kind, from severe thunderstorms to winter weather and more, you owe it to yourself to check out MetEd. Do it now and you can thank me later for sending you. MetEd is a great way to hone your skills during the long stretch between now and Storm Season 2011.

Between Idolatry and Joy: Some Thoughts on Life from a Jazz Saxophonist and Storm Chaser

There is an art to pursuing the things we’re most passionate about without letting them consume us. I certainly find this to be true of my own two interests, jazz saxophone and storm chasing, but the principle applies to all of us in whatever our preoccupations may be. Without fascination, energy, focus, and joy to drive us wholeheartedly in our pursuits, there’s no point to them; yet without restraint, self-awareness, and awareness of the broader world around us, it is easy to become a mile deep in our passions and an inch deep in life at large. Between these two realities, for me and I think for many of us, there lies a dynamic tension.

As a disciple of Jesus, I have to reckon with the issue of idolatry. In Old Testament times, an idol was easy to identify. It’s hard for us today to fathom people fashioning gold calves and graven images, both human and bestial, and then worshiping the things that they themselves had crafted. Yet that’s exactly what people did back then, both in pagan nations and in apostate Israel.

The funny thing is, we’re no different. We still bow down to the works of our hands, to things that are capable of becoming our gods if we let them. Things that blind us to truths bigger than ourselves and hinder our capacity to love God and others.

The problem with our modern idols, however, is that they’re not readily identifiable as such in the same manner as, say, a brazen bull or a figurine of Marduk. Anything in our lives can become an idol–our careers, our pursuits, significant relationships, the desire for love, our injuries and disappointments, our causes, our appetites, our emotions, our cars and other possessions, even our ministries and charitable occupations. Idolatry today is not usually something that is innate to the things in our lives, but is a matter of our attitude toward them and God. In ways subtle and not so subtle, it’s easy for us to invest ourselves in what we have and what we do in such a way that we allow it to define life and purpose for us. That’s a problem, because any of it can be taken away from us at any time, and sooner or later all of it is going to go. Then where do we find meaning; then where do we find life?

Moreover, we can become irresponsible and selfish in reaching for what we’ve defined as life, setting our pursuits above people we love and who love us. When we’re frustrated in those pursuits, we can become downright nasty, even destructive, toward persons who seem to inconvenience us, challenge us, or obstruct us. We’ll sacrifice others to our idols and justify ourselves in doing so rather than deal with our own hearts.

All this in the quest for life on our own terms.

Well do the words of Isaiah the prophet speak to us today: “[The idolater] feeds on ashes; a deluded heart misleads him. He cannot save himself or say, ‘Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?'”

Is there a flip side to this coin?

Of course there is. If God never intended for us to enshrine the things that we enjoy and love to do, neither does he want us to smother those things in sackcloth. In the Bible’s book of Genesis, in the Creation story, God from the beginning gave Adam and Eve something meaningful to do. They were gardeners, caring for the trees and flowers in Eden. Ironically, after they sinned, the man and woman’s immediate response was to hide from God behind the very things he had assigned them to cultivate and protect.

The problem lay not in the shrubs and trees and vines, but in Adam and Eve. The greenery in the garden was the same as the day when God first looked on it and called it good; it was the human heart that had changed. Ever since, in various ways, we’ve had a tendency to conceal ourselves from God and from each other behind the things we do.

Yet those same pursuits also have the potential to express the robust life of Jesus living in us untamed and unfettered. There’s nothing at all winsome about Christians who are so paranoid about idolatry that everything they do is constrained by a gray, lackluster religiosity. Many well-meaning believers confuse holiness with a boxed-in, sanctimonious, hermetically sealed existence that is about as invigorating as paper pulp. It hardly mirrors God’s exuberance in the act of creation, when with a decisive word he spun the visions of his heart into being–planets, suns, galaxies, luminous gas clouds, multiplied quintillions of celestial objects, all whirling across the velvet-black vastness; ocean tides pulsing and surf crashing against craggy shorelines; wildflowers waving in vivid, multi-hued pointillism in meadows and forests, knit together, unseen, by untold millions of miles of subterranean roots and rootlets.

Talk about a hobby! It was no dour, stuff-shirted God who created this fabulous world around us, this universe that awes and fascinates and humbles us; no, it was an eternal being who throughout the ages remains forever young–smarter than the most brilliant scientist, wiser than the wisest sage, yet passionately, perpetually, and unapologetically a child at heart.

God created us to live our lives as wholeheartedly, creatively, lovingly, generously, fearlessly, and beautifully as he lives his, in ways unique to each of us. Failure to do so is in itself a form of idolatry, a lack of trust that the One who hardwired us with our personal interests also supplies the grace and wisdom to express his life and fulfill his intentions through those interests.

The overarching principle is love–love of God and love of others. Love is ultimately what separates between idolatry–which is about pursuing our own independent way on our own terms–and the abundant, God-dependent life that Jesus offers. Christianity is not about good morals and rock-hard dogma; it is about nothing less than the life of Jesus himself living inside us, energizing us, guiding us in the pathway of his character. That is no weak, wan way of living. To be sure, it is a way that is often marked by self-sacrifice, pain, loneliness, misunderstanding, prayer, struggle, and self-control. But it is also a way infused with immense purpose, remarkable potential, endless fascination, and a joy that can be found in nothing else this life can offer.

In conclusion

Bringing all of the above to bear in a practical way for those of us who chase storms and/or play music: Whatever you do, do it with all your heart. God is not glorified by a timorous approach to the things you enjoy, nor does he want you to walk on eggshells for fear of offending him. Just keep in mind that there is more to life than your pursuits. Enjoy those pursuits, treasure them, but don’t grasp them so tightly that you can’t let go, and don’t let them give you tunnel vision so that you fail to see and participate in the broadness of life around you. Other people’s worlds are as rich and important as yours; to the best of your ability, enter into them, celebrate them, and let them expand you. Harness your interests in a way that makes your life bigger, not smaller–an expression of generosity, not selfishness, and of a Christlike perspective that values God and others most of all.

Behind the sound of a saxophone playing now tenderly, now exuberantly, always striving for creativity and beauty…behind the sublimity, the fascination, and the awe of a tornado churning across the open prairie…you can, if you choose, hear the song and see the face of God. If you submit your heart to him, he will in turn release his own magnificent heart in and through the things you love to do.

This, in part, is what life, true life, is about: allowing the things that are central to us to become the servants and the expressions of Someone far bigger than ourselves, and of a kingdom greater than our own.

Late October Chase Bust

After 1,200 miles and a busted chase in northern Missouri and southwest Iowa, I returned home at 2:30 in the morning. Why on earth, you may wonder, would I travel all that way to watch storms that never did more than produce weak wall clouds and a bit of hail? What madness possessed me and my chase partner, Bill Oosterbaan, to go storm chasing this late in the year anyway?

For one thing, the setup actually looked promising on paper. You can read all about it in my previous post, but the long and short of it was, the right ingredients looked to be in

place. For another thing, look: it’s the end of October, and in view of the fact that I’m probably not going to see another chaseworthy setup within a day’s drive for the next four or five months, I’ll take what I can get. I grasped at a slimmer straw than yesterday’s for my first chase of 2010, and now, at the end of the year, it was nice just to get out, hit the open road one last time with my long-time chase buddy, Bill, and take whatever came our way.

I might add that, had we actually gotten a tornado or two, Bill and I would have looked like storm chasing geniuses, the guys who score on a day when other chasers stay home. Talk about my status as a chaser going up! “How did you know?” everyone would ask. I’d just smile sagely. “Instinct,” I’d reply. “You get to where you can just sense it in your gut.”

Excuse me, I seem to have been dreaming. As I was about to say, dropping south out of Des Moines down I-35, we headed toward a small convective cluster in northwest Missouri near Maryville that was trying to get going south of a weak warm front. The shear was present to help these storms organize and you could see them doing their best, but  evidently the instability

just wasn’t enough to really inspire them. Firing toward the end of peak heating with rapidly waning insolation, the storms may have choked off the CAPE with their own shadows. Maybe a little more moisture would have done the trick, maybe a little better heating, but whatever the case, the storms never offered much more than some weak wall clouds and a bit of hail.

Our first storm actually looked promising for a minute, exhibiting a decent wall cloud that

looked like it actually might intensify. But that never happened. What we were left with for our long drive was an enjoyable afternoon and evening roaming through the hilly, autumnal landscape of Missouri and Iowa, doing one of the things we both love best–following the sky, chasing the clouds.

Midwest Storm Chase Shaping Up for Monday

Monday is shaping up to be one of those days that will tear me in two: the first really decent storm chasing setup in the Midwest, beautifully accessible, but my finances are too meager right now for me to do anything about it. Aaargh!

Just look at this TwisterData 12Z NAM forecast sounding for April 5, 00Z, in extreme northeastern Missouri, up near Cantril, Iowa (click to enlarge). It’s near a nice 1 km EHI bullseye. Nice CAPE, nice veering with height, just a dab of CINH–what more could you ask for? The hodograph, not shown, curves beautifully.

However the exact mesoscale details shake out come Monday, the models have lately been coming together nicely to paint a compelling warm-front picture in southeast Iowa, northeast Missouri, and western Illinois.  Somewhere in that vicinity, tornadoes look likely. Maybe farther west, too, though capping may be an issue. Right now, though, I’m not current on the  dryline/triple point play; my attention is focused on my own back yard.

This promises to be a sweet setup for Great Lakes chasers. Maybe there’ll be some fortuitous way I can seize the opportunity, but I have an idea that I’ll be armchair chasing Monday afternoon and eating my heart out. As for Tuesday, well, there’s been talk about that, but right now I’m not as excited about it. Monday’s the day. Oh, man. So near and yet so far–gotta get to it some kinda way.