Winter Arrives in Michigan

Today is the first day of meteorological winter. Since my post on this date last year explains why, from a weatherly perspective, winter begins on December 1 instead of December 22, there’s no need for me to re-pave that same road here.

However, the weather today is quite different from what it was a year ago. Back then, we were getting a pretty good dusting of lake effect snow, and I included a radar capture in that day’s post to show what we could expect for the next four months. In contrast, today has dawned clear-skied, and this bright sun streaming through the sliding glass door directly onto my face is forcing me to squint with my left eye and prompting me to fetch my broad-brimmed Tilley hat directly after I dot this sentence.

There, hat installed. Much better. Now, what was I saying? Oh, yeah … unlike last year’s snowy opener here in West Michigan, this winter is stepping in with a smile. But that signifieth nothing. Two days ago, on November 29, the state got its first taste of accumulation in a belt that slanted, roughly, from Coldwater up toward Saginaw.

Here in my little town, what was initially forecast to be at least an inch of snow turned out to be just an errant flake or two. The payload didn’t miss us by much, though; just a few miles to the east, the snow came down. Last night, driving home from a practice session with my sax in Clarksville, I noticed that the fields were covered. The satellite photo to your left shows what the actual accumulation looks like from above. (Thanks to my friend Mike Kovalchick for initially posting this image in Facebook.)

Cold temperatures are becoming the norm. From here on, the forties will be a high, and anything in the fifties, a gift. We’re in that transition zone between rain and snow, with snow becoming the dominant form of precipitation. More of it is in the forecast for this week, and I don’t doubt that by the time the winter solstice arrives on December 22, meteorological winter will already have settled in with a smug grin on its face.

Today, though, the sun is shining, and while this isn’t exactly T-shirt weather, I’ll take it. Time to sign off and get the rest of the day rolling.

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PS  You might also enjoy reading my explanation of the meteorological seasons in  “Winter Comes Knocking,” posted yesterday in my new blog, Fox’s World.

December 1, 2011 by
Filed Under: Life, Michigan, Weather Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Black Friday Quickie Update

It’s the day after Thanksgiving, and weatherwise, all I can say about the storm system I wrote about a couple days ago is, eh. Looks like a yawn to me. Heck, it’s November. Not much more to comment about there.

I’m gazing out the window at a gorgeous afternoon here in Caledonia, and in a couple minutes, I’m going to step out to enjoy it. Looks like this will be my last opportunity for a while, maybe quite a while. Tomorrow the rain sets in, and Sunday the temperatures drop. Snow is entering the forecast for this coming week. But today at least is golden.

Ben Holcomb is in town, so around 5:30 I’m heading downtown to get with him, Bill, Tom, and whoever else of the Michigan Storm Chasers Contingent decides to show up at The Tavern on the Square. After that, the guys are going to the Griffins game, but I’ll be passing on that.

Musically, I’ve begun transcribing a Richie Cole solo on the Charlie Parker tune “Confirmation.” For some reason, lately I’ve gotten it into my head that I’m going to nail down this tune once and for all, definitively, and there’s no better way to facilitate the process than transcribing the solo of someone who knows it inside-out. Cole is a monster bebop alto player who burns through Bird changes using the full range of his horn, from low Bb up to an altissimo note that I have yet to identify, a note so high it sounds like a mosquito singing in falsetto.

So there you have it. While the rest of America is bashing its brains out at the Black Friday sales, I’ll be enjoying the sunshine and congratulating myself for staying as far away from the stores as possible. Cheerio!

November 25, 2011 by
Filed Under: Jazz, Michigan, Music, Saxophone, Weather Tagged With: , , , ,

Looking Down to Dixie

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This bright morning sun streaming through the sliding door of my balcony is blinding. At quarter-to-ten on the day before Thanksgiving, it shines low over the southeast horizon directly onto my face, forcing me to write with my left eye shut. That is not an altogether satisfying modus operandi, but I don’t feel like closing the blinds or wearing a … well, what the hell, why not wear a hat? I’ve just put on my trusty Tilley. Problem solved, though Lisa will probably look at me oddly when she steps into the room.

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Here in West Michigan, we’re moving into high pressure and a warming trend through the holiday. But “warm” is a relative word which in this case means not terribly cold–rather nice, really–but don’t plan on wearing a T-shirt.

Hundreds of miles to my south, though, warm means warm. Warm enough to get the job done for convective weather. From now through April, Dixie Alley once again becomes the star of the show. The trough moving in for the weekend offers a good example of why.

It’s a deep trough, and a surface low up in the Great Lakes looks to wick up enough moisture into the Southeast to stoke the storm machine. I’ve included a couple of the latest 00Z Euro/GFS comparisons plus Euro 850 mb relative humidity to give you a sense of what’s shaping up for 96 hours

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(click on images to enlarge them). The GFS is predictably faster than the ECMWF, but both are pointing to the same overall scenario, with the trough eventually pinching off into a closed low.

Cloud cover presently looks like it will be rampant, minimizing instability. Still, given some ripping bulk shear, this system is something to keep an eye on as it evolves, particularly if you live in Dixie Alley.

That’s all for now. The sun has moved and is no longer blinding me. Time to get on with the rest of this day. May you and yours enjoy a happy and blessed Thanksgiving!

November 23, 2011 by
Filed Under: Storm Chasing, Weather, Weather Maps Tagged With: , , , ,

Another La Nina for Winter 2011–2012

Snowfalls that paralyzed entire regions. A record-breaking tornado season. An unrelenting summer heat dome that baked much of the nation for weeks on end, coupled with disastrous drought conditions in the southwest. That has been our weather year 2011 to date, courtesy of its La Nina, which commenced in June of 2010 and ended last April.

In another month, we can kiss the whole mess good-bye and good riddance. It’s not the kind of year a body wants to see repeated anytime soon. But with yet another La Nina winter shaping up, chances are that’s what we’ve got in store. In its typical terse language, NOAA’s Enso Cycle: Recent Evolution, Current Status and Predictions sums things up thus:

• La Niña conditions are present across the equatorial Pacific.
• Sea surface temperatures (SST) were at least -0.5°C below average across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean.
• Atmospheric circulation anomalies are consistent with La Niña.
• La Niña is expected to strengthen and continue through the Northern Hemisphere winter 2011-12.

.

The United States needs another La Nina right now the way a sick drunk needs another bottle of Boone’s Farm. We’re still reeling from the previous episode, and now here comes round two. While no one can predict with certainty how it’s going to play out, the generalities are these:

• The north-central CONUS and portions of the Great Lakes down through the Ohio Valley are likely to see colder and wetter conditions.

• The south and southwest can expect warmer and drier weather–not welcome news to those living in West Texas and other places that have already endured week after rainless week this summer.

Also, while you won’t find it stated in ENSO literature, statistically, tornado outbreaks east of the Mississippi have tended to occur during La Nina springs. Whether a correlation does in fact exist, circum 2011 certainly seems to corroborate the notion.

Let’s hope that this new player turns out to be La Nina Lite in terms of its impact. I can’t imagine that it will be as nasty as its predecessor, but anything is possible. We’re only getting started, and already the Northeast has gotten clobbered with a record-setting winter storm. The plus side is, parts of the drought-stricken West have received a rare and welcome snowfall. That’s good, and I hope they get more precipitation, lots more, be it snow or rain.

For those of you who pray, this new La Nina is something to enter in your prayer list and keep an eye on. This winter could be another bad one, and storm chasers may once again have their hands full next spring. Let’s hope that Dixie Alley experiences nothing like what it did this year. We’ll find out five or six months from now.

October 31, 2011 by
Filed Under: Life, Michigan, Nature, Weather Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

A Stormy Evening in Stanton

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Last weekend my best male friend, Dewey (aka Duane, aka The Scurvy Rascal), and I headed up to a hunting camp in the backwoods of Kalkaska, Michigan, for a weekend retreat. It was a time of refreshing for both of us: a time of reconnecting and confirming our friendship after a season, for each of us, of being hammered on by life; a time of drinking good craft beer and Scotch whiskey, and eating steaks cooked over an open fire; a time of hunting, and shooting clays, and blasting away with assorted pistols, including my favorite, a model 1911 .45; and a time of prayer, and reading the Bible, and talking about our passion for God, our beloved women, and life in general. A good, good time.

I drove up to Dewey’s home in Stanton Thursday evening. My laptop came with me, but I had suspended my data account with Verizon, and for some reason I was unable to access Duane’s router. With storms in the forecast, naturally I wanted to know what the radar had to show. So Dewey pulled up KGRR on his laptop, and Bingo! A nice line was moving toward Stanton and looked to arrive within a half-hour.

What the heck. I hopped in my car and took off, intent on finding a picturesque sweep of open landscape where I could watch the storm move in. As you can tell from the images on this page, I found one.

The storm was not nearly as formidable as it looks. It provided a nice bit of wind and a brief downpour; mostly, though, it was beautiful and offered a treat for the eyes. The setting sun filtered in low behind the cloud base, shining its rose-colored light through a curtain of rain and illuminating the backsides of gray, steamy towers.

But why am I talking like this? Here, see for yourself. The photos are in sequence; click on them to enlarge them, and enjoy the view.

[Show as slideshow]
October 9, 2011 by
Filed Under: Life, Michigan, Nature, Outdoors, Photography, Storm Chasing, Weather Tagged With: , , , ,

My July 27 Michigan Tornado Video, for What It’s Worth

Michigan is not Oklahoma. It is not even Illinois. If you’re a storm chaser who has any life experience with this state, as a few of you do besides me, you know exactly what I mean. Had Dorothy and Toto lived here instead of in Kansas, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz would never have been written. That or else author L. Frank Baum would have had to find a dfferent means of lofting his main character and her little dog somewhere over the rainbow.

Sure, Michigan gets its annual tally of tornadoes. It’s just that most of them are something less than what you’ll encounter west of the Mississippi or down south in Dixie Alley. That’s not a bad thing, given our population density. But it does require Michigan-based chasers to either travel long distances out of state or else languish from convective malnutrition.

You want to see a Michigan tornado? Okay, I’ll show you a Michigan tornado. But be forewarned, it’s not a pretty sight. It’s barely any kind of a sight at all. When I first spotted it, I wasn’t even certain it was a tornado, though after reviewing my HD clip and getting a couple of other reliable opinions, I’m now convinced. Good thing, too, because it’s all I’ve got to show for this year in terms of actually seeing a tornado. That’s pretty pathetic, considering the chase opportunities that circum 2011 has presented. But you can’t chase when your 85-year-old mother is having a knee replacement, as mine did on April 27, the day of the 2011 Super Outbreak; or when you just don’t have the money to go gallivanting freely across Tornado Alley, a reality that has badly limited me this year.

Given such circumstances, you grab what you can, where you can, when you can. July 27 was an example. Although a light risk tapped on the very westernmost edge of Michigan, my state was for the most part outlooked for nothing more than general thunderstorms. Severe weather wasn’t a concern. So imagine my surprise when I spotted distinct rotation on GR3 in a cell just to my southwest, heading ESE toward Hastings.

Grabbing my gear, I hopped in my car and headed east, setting up my laptop on the way. And what do you know! The radar didn’t lie. The storm had a large, well-defined wall cloud that I caught up with as I approached Hastings on State Road.

Since my video clip doesn’t show much in the way of structure, let me assure those of you who care about such things that this storm had good visual clues: impressive wall cloud, crisp updraft tower, and a warm RFD cascading off the back end. As I’ve already mentioned, storm motion was ESE, which corroborates my recollection of a northwest flow regime and explains why the rotation was more on the northwest part of the cell than the southwest. Also, as I recall, surface winds were from the SSW, though I can’t say how they were behaving ahead of the updraft area as I never managed to outpace the storm.

With all that said, here’s what happens in the video: Heading south behind the storm, I first spot the tornado out of my side window, which is covered with raindrops. Those somewhat obscure the funnel, but you can still make it out as a small, faint, whitish blotch connecting the cloud base to the treeline a little ways to the right of center. At this point I’m debating with myself and conclude that the feature is just scud. I park the car, zoom in on the storm and lose focus, then roll down the window and zoom back out. You’ll then see a small sapling mid-screen, and the tornado still barely visible to its right as a tiny strand of light gray condensation set against the darker background. It, translates almost imperceptibly to the right for a handful of seconds before vanishing. In my HD clip, I can make out something of an actual rope-out, but you can’t tell with YouTube.

Nevertheless, even though YouTube isn’t great for detail, I think you’ll see what I’m talking about overall. I promise you, it’s there; you just have to look closely. And use your imagination. And be highly suggestible. And believe in the Tooth Fairy. (I’ve also got some clips of Sasquatch and the Loch Ness monster that you may take an interest in, but those are for another time.)

The tornado doesn’t appear in the day’s storm reports, and I don’t believe the supercell that produced it ever got severe-warned. I think I was the only chaser on the darn thing, at least from my side of the state. I did report the wall cloud to GRR. I never bothered with the tornado because it was there and gone before I’d made up my mind what it was. It certainly was an anemic little puke, and I’m not sure whether to feel grateful that I scored at least one tube this year or to feel mortified about even claiming it. I almost felt sorry for the poor thing, and if I could have, I’d have taken it home and cared for it until it was healthy, and then released it under some nice, beefy updraft tower while strains of “Born Free” played in the background.

Go ahead and laugh, but I’m probably the only chaser in Michigan who got video of this tornado. Then again, that’s nothing to brag about, particularly in a year when so many chasers have captured videos of violent, mile-wide monsters. It’s just, like I said, all I’ve got to show. Yeah, I was there with my buddies right by the airport when the April 22 Saint Louis tornado hit, but none of us actually saw a funnel. I doubt anyone did after dark in all that rain. So July 27 is it for me, my sole visual record. Mine, all mine. Bob’s tornado. I’ve assigned it an F6 on the original Fujita scale, F6 being a hypothetical rating associated with “inconceivable damage.” That description fits perfectly, as this tornado was practically hypothetical, and it’s inconceivable to me that it could have damaged much of anything. Maybe snatched up an ill-fitting toupee, but that’s about it.

So there you have it: a genuine Michigan tornado. Now you know what storm chasing is like here in my state. It’s just another of the great perks that this supercell haven has to offer besides its economy.

I will say this: we do have fantastic craft beer.

September 27, 2011 by
Filed Under: Humor, Michigan, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Video, Weather Tagged With: , , , ,

So Much for Waterspouts

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Waterspouts were in the marine forecast for Lake Michigan today. For that matter, they’re still there through tomorrow. But while people on the west side of the pond witnessed a few spouts, they didn’t materialize here on the Michigan shore.

With a closed upper low retrograding to the southwest and a persistent land breeze pushing convergence well offshore, out over the middle of the lake, any waterspouts that formed were far out of view from Michigan eyes. From the South Haven beach where Nick Nolte and I were hanging out, I could see a line of low towers pushing up over the waters 20 or 30 miles to west, moving ever-so-slowly to the northwest. The only Michiganians who might have seen a spout were boaters.

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Sigh … I got up bright and early and arrived at the beach around 8:00 a.m., but the waterspouts eluded me. Nothing new there. I have yet to see a spout, but I live in hope.

The clouds over the lake were pretty, though, lit by the morning sun. I snapped a few photos just to show I was there, paying my waterspout dues. I figure that if I keep slipping tokens into the slot, pretty soon I’m bound to come up with a winner. Meanwhile, a few pics on a cool, moody September morning on the lakeshore aren’t a bad compensation prize.

September 24, 2011 by
Filed Under: Michigan, Nature, Outdoors, Photography, Storm Chasing, Weather Tagged With: ,

Hurricane Rain

Standing on the waterfront of Atlantic Beach watching the brobdingnagian surf from Hurricane Irene batter the shore, it didn’t immediately occur to me that I was getting drenched. But I was. The driest part of me was my hair, covered as it was by my rain hood. Otherwise, I was thoroughly soaked. But I was oblivious to my waterlogged state, and this is something that, upon contemplation, I find remarkable.

Irene was my first–and quite likely will be my last–exposure to hurricane rain. What strikes me about that rain, apart from its intensity, is how extraordinarily comfortable it feels. It is the warmest rain imaginable, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in Michigan or anywhere else in the United States. Irene’s rain was so bathwater warm, and the air so equally balmy, that there was no sense of chill present to tell my skin, “Yo! You are freeking wet!”

A warm summer shower in Michigan is something that your inner thermometer still registers as fairly cool, though not objectionably so. As for the rains of a northern autumn, those will freeze you to the marrow. In contrast, Irene’s rain was so warm that at first I was barely aware of being rained on. It wasn’t until I looked down at my legs and saw the state of my shorts that I realized I was saturated.

Top-to-bottom saturated, it turned out. My Helly Hansen rain jacket, which had seen little use since its faithful service 10 years ago up in the Canadian wilderness, was in a state of deterioration that rendered it worthless. Unknown to me, pieces of blue rubber from the collar were cleaving to my neck in a ring. The zipper wouldn’t zip. And the warm rains of Irene had penetrated my protective layer and drenched my shirt. Had I been in Michigan, I’d have known about this state of affairs quickly. But not in Irene’s tepid environment. Chill just isn’t a part of the skin’s alert system in a tropical cyclone. A person could drown in comfort simply by standing outdoors.

Now, isn’t that fascinating. Okay, maybe not. Not to those of you who live on the Gulf Coast, anyway. But for a lad from a small West Michigan cow town, it’s the peak of interest. Here in the frozen hinterlands, we reach for novelty where we can, and hurricane rain qualifies.

Ahem … okay, enough for tonight. There’s a bowl of oatmeal that I want to watch congeal. Signing off.

September 7, 2011 by
Filed Under: Nature, Storm Chasing, Weather Tagged With: , , , ,

September 3, 2011, Outflow Boundaries

Yesterday morning my friend Kurt Hulst called to say, “Grab your camera. There’s a great shelf cloud coming your way. It passed my location before I could get a picture.”

Okay, then. My apartment faces east, and all I could see was blue sky. Not even a hint that a storm might be approaching from the west, and usually one gets at least some kind of a clue. But I snatched up my camera and car keys regardless and headed outside.

Yes, there it was–a hazy arcus cloud moving my way from the west and northwest. I hopped in my car, with the intention of finding a better view for taking photographs than my parking lot afforded. But the cloud was moving faster than I realized, and by the time I reached 108th Street, it was almost on top of me. So, with the wind kicking up flurries of leaves in front of me, I headed east, thinking to put a little distance between the shelf cloud and me.

Several miles down the road, I turned north, parked by a buffalo farm, stepped out of my car to get a look, and realized immediately that my cause was lost. The cloud was right overhead. It had to have been moving at least 60 mph. So much for weather photos. Within seconds, I was looking at the backside of the arcus, and it wasn’t particularly photogenic.

For that matter, there wasn’t much to it. No ensuing rain, no lightning, no thunder, no storm at all, just blue skies. I can’t speak for other parts of the country, but here in Michigan it is an odd thing to observe an impressive-looking shelf cloud with absolutely nothing behind it! The cloud evidently had formed as the isolated effect of cold outflow from dissipated storms back in Wisconsin, in conjunction with a closer, severe-warned MCS to the north. Back at home, I could see the outflow boundary arching southwest all the way down into Indiana and moving rapidly east.

Yesterday seemed to be the day for such phenomenon to be clearly defined on the radar. Later in the afternoon, GR3 showed a similarly highly distinct outflow boundary down in northern Indiana. The source of this one was easy

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to see: storms to its northwest and north. It looked pretty vigorous, and I wondered if it was putting on a show similar to what I had witnessed.

As an item of curiosity and an example of a highly defined outflow boundary–I suppose you could call it a runaway gust front–I captured a screen shot. Click on the image to enlarge it.

September 4, 2011 by
Filed Under: Michigan, Nature, Outdoors, Storm Chasing, Weather, Weather Radar Tagged With: , , , , ,

Hurricane Irene in North Carolina

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Hurricane Irene demonstrated to me conclusively that hurricanes aren’t my thing. Maybe I’m too cautious; maybe I’m downright chicken; maybe I’m smart. Certainly I’m inexperienced; just as certainly, I’ve never felt the same fascination for the hurricane environment, as I’ve understood it, as I have for tornadoes and supercells. However these various factors work in combination, the bottom line is, while I’m glad I got the opportunity last weekend to experience an impressive degree of Irene, if not her full fury, I doubt that my future holds any more hurricane interceptions.

Hurricanes and tornadoes are different animals, and the mindsets required for a severe weather junkie to appreciate the two are worlds apart. A tornado is ephemeral, arriving and departing in minutes; a hurricane is a time commitment of hours, possibly a lot of hours. A tornado is something you go to see; a hurricane is something you go to experience. A tornado’s human impact is terrestrial; a hurricane’s, amphibious, bringing the ocean with it as it arrives onshore. A tornado is something you seek to avoid getting munched by; a hurricane is something you purposely allow to ingest you, and it requires that you be willing to risk circumstances of a kind and scope that can outstrip anything even the worst tornado can produce.

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I’m by no means minimizing the lethal, wholesale destructiveness of tornadoes. I’m just saying, we’re comparing apples and oranges. Yes, both storms pack a heckuva lotta wind, both are capable of horrific impact on communities, and both can kill you equally dead. But beyond that, the similarities vanish.

Different personalities embrace the variables in different ways. My friend and long-time storm chasing partner, Bill Oosterbaan, is now hooked on hurricanes. His brother, Tom, enjoyed doing the eyewall with Bill at Morehead City, North Carolina, but I suspect that once was enough for him. As for me, witnessing the massive surf pounding Atlantic Beach as Irene approached, and watching tropical-storm winds and hurricane-force gusts blast our hotel inland at Greenville, was all the taste of Irene I needed. Don’t get me wrong–the experience was thoroughly exhilarating, and I’m really glad I went. I just can’t see doing it again, particularly with a stronger hurricane than Irene.

I never expected to go to begin with. As Bill and Tom were making plans a few days in advance, I chimed in on the discussion, but I had neither the money nor the driving desire to join them, though I confess that I was intrigued. Then Bill called me three hours before their departure with the news that their trip would be underwritten and wouldn’t cost a cent. Would I like to go?

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It was a kind, thoughtful offer. Bill knew that this storm season–historic and record-breaking as it has been for tornadoes–had been a miserable one for me as far as chasing went. Between family responsibilities and personal finances, it had been an utter washout, to the point where I’ve felt awkward even calling myself a storm chaser. Yeah, I’ve earned the merit badge over the last 15 years, but you wouldn’t know it judging by this year. Bill and Tom, good friends that they are, knew that I had felt the disappointment keenly and wanted me to have at least something to show for circum 2011.

So, making a last-minute decision, I grabbed the opportunity, threw some clothes into my softside, grabbed my gear, and off we went.

GPS and Live-Stream Hassles

Bill had made arrangements with WOOD TV8 to live-stream Irene using his new, super-fast Asus quad-core laptop. Unfortunately, DeLorme’s serial port emulator wouldn’t work with the laptop’s 64-bit Windows 7 OS, nor would Bill’s GPSGate recognize the DeLorme puck. The long and short of it was, while Bill could stream through iMap, there was no way of showing his location, rendering his live stream useless.

My computer isn’t as fast as Bill’s, but it’s fast enough, and it didn’t pose the same problems. However, for some reason, I kept losing my mobile signal Friday as we headed towards Morehead City. Worse yet, my output on iMap appeared jerky and horribly pixelated, to the point where I finally just gave it up. So much for live streaming for both of us. And so much for getting the trip underwritten.

Big Surf at Atlantic Beach

Friday, August 26. After checking into our hotel in Greenville, North Carolina, we set off for Morehead City. When we arrived, the bridge to Atlantic Beach beckoned, so over we went. We parked in a lot occupied by various media crews as well as casual sightseers. With just two hours before law enforcement intended to start kicking people off the island, we bundled on our rain gear and took in the massive waves pounding the shoreline.

The eye of the hurricane was still a good 150 or more miles south of us, but the wind was stiff and the sea a maelstrom of spuming breakers and brown, roiling undertow. My YouTube video doesn’t do justice to that wild, watery scene. The waves farther out in the video had to have been a good 15 feet high, their tops trailing spray into the gale as they raced toward shore.

By the way, that’s me in the rain jacket and shorts, cavorting in front of the waves. Hi, Mom!

Bill was determined to stick around and experience the eyewall, and I had the nervous sense that he wanted to hang out on the barrier island. My concern was that the island might wind up underwater, and that even Morehead City could get inundated by floodwaters, or the storm surge, or both. It just didn’t seem wise to me to locate ourselves that close to the Atlantic shoreline. Irene, which the day before had been forecast to make landfall as a category 3 storm, had by now been downgraded to a top-end category 1, but she was still an abnormally huge hurricane. I was concerned that our escape routes would be cut off and we would find ourselves stranded, with nowhere to go and the ocean encroaching on us as Irene’s eye moved in. High winds I’m fine with–bring ’em on; I like it. But I prefer them as a dry-land phenomenon, not a maritime experience.

Ultimately, I wimped out. The guys graciously brought me back to our hotel in Greenville, which was where I’d thought we would ride out the storm to begin with. I felt ashamed of myself for inconveniencing them, and I knew that Bill was disappointed. We’ve shared so many storm adventures over the years, but this wouldn’t be one of them. To be fair to myself, my reasonings–not all of which I’ve elaborated on here–were, I believe, fairly sound. Plus, again, I’ve never felt drawn to hurricanes the way I am to tornadoes and severe thunderstorms. Still, I had moved from an asset to a liability.

I beat myself up for quite awhile, so in case anyone reading this post feels inclined to pitch in their two cents, spare yourself the effort. I already did the job for you. That said, there was something to be said for peeling off my sopping clothes–which, thanks to a catastrophic failure on the part of my Helly Hansen rain suit, had gotten totally drenched–and then kicking back on a dry bed to watch the unfolding coverage of Irene on TV.

Saturday, August 27

When I awoke, Irene was making landfall at Morehead City. I picked up the phone and called Bill. No answer, and no surprise. I wasn’t certain whether the cell phone towers were working, but I was sure that the guys had their hands full. The television showed the west side of Irene’s eye squarely over their heads.

Outside, the wind was lashing a tree out in the courtyard and blowing a fine spray of rain against the window. Hurricane rain is not like the rain you get with an ordinary thunderstorm. The hydrometeors are smaller, halfway between droplets and wind-driven drizzle. But what a drizzle! Watching the stuff lash horizontally across the landscape, alternating between lighter respites and sudden, heavier bursts that tumble along like fog shot from a cannon, you really can’t fathom just how much is actually falling. The answer is, lots, an almost inconceivable amount.

By and by, I got curious what the view offered from a vantage point other than my fourth-floor room. Grabbing my video camera, I took the elevator downstairs and headed for the hotel entrance. There, for the first time, I got a good taste of Irene. Greenville may not have been in range of the hurricane’s full force, but the westward extent of her tropical-storm winds had surprised forecasters, and my location lay within a concentrated area of those winds. With sustained speeds of 55 mph and gusts as high as 75 mph, there was more than enough to hold my interest.

The higher winds in a hurricane are associated with its rain bands. When you see one of those bands approaching your location on radar, you can count on two things happening simultaneously: It is going to get very rainy, and it is going to get very windy. The transition occurs with a suddenness that verges on explosive, and in Greenville, its effect was everything you could imagine. Trees were down, and more were going down all the time. Branches were snapping. Power was out over a large area. In the hotel, the electricity flickered off and on, off and on, but amazingly, it somehow stayed with us for all but one two-hour stretch. As for Internet connection, forget it. I had been without radar updates since shortly after 8:00 a.m. So much for getting GR2AE volume scans of Irene while she was over Morehead City. They’d have made a nice memento for the guys, but there was no accessing the data.

The Storm Troopers Return

Bill and Tom returned around 3:00 in the afternoon, exhilarated and exhausted. After showering up, they headed back out into the wind and rain to catch dinner at one of the few open restaurants. They returned in an hour and filled me in on their eyewall experience. It sounded awesome, and I’m glad it was everything they’d hoped for. I can honestly say I didn’t mind having missed it, but I was pleased that they got what they were after. Particularly Bill. Experiencing a hurricane is something he’d been wanting to do for several years, and now that he’s gotten it in his blood, I’m quite sure he’ll do it again.

tree-down_1
We started for home around 8:00 Sunday morning. The first 25 to 30 miles westward were littered with downed trees. Some of them blocked the road, requiring us twice to find an alternate route. In a few places, yards and even homes were flooded. Corn fields had been flattened by the wind and rain, and the tobacco, while not appearing as badly ravaged, had clearly taken a hit. Other more compact crops such as cotton and soy beans had fared better.

Fourteen hours later, a few minutes after 10:00 p.m., we rolled into Bill’s driveway, and a short while afterward, I was in my own vehicle driving east down M-6 toward home and my sweetheart, Lisa.

Will I do another hurricane? Well, I didn’t entirely do Irene for reasons I’ve at least partly explained. I did, however, get enough of a taste to confirm my sense that hurricanes don’t exert the same pull on me as tornadoes. I’m grateful to Bill and Tom for wanting me to join them–thank you so much, guys! I really appreciate it. Those middle rain bands in Greenville may not have been as intense as what you witnessed, but they were a blast, and I’m very glad I got to see at least that much of Irene.

However, lacking the passion required for accepting the risks involved, I would likely be just as reluctant to commit to a landfall intercept in the future as I was this time, and thus I would simply detract from the experience for others. That wouldn’t be fair to them or enjoyable for me.

So, while the old saying may be, “Never say never,” I seriously doubt that another hurricane lies on my horizon. Not anytime soon, anyway. If you enjoy multiplied hours of wind, water, sweat, and uncertainty, then a hurricane just might be your thing. Me, I’ll stick with tornadoes. They’re not so all-fired comprehensive.

September 1, 2011 by
Filed Under: Life, Nature, Outdoors, Storm Chasing, Video, Weather Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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