The Historic 2011 Tornado Season in Review: A Video Interview with Storm Chaser Bill Oosterbaan, Part 1

Just about any way you look at it, the 2011 tornado season has been exceptional, disastrous, spectacular, and heartbreaking. On April 25–28, the largest tornado outbreak in United States history claimed over 340 lives over a span of 78 1/2 hours. Hardest hit was northern Alabama, where 239 of the fatalities occurred. Of the 335 confirmed tornadoes that drilled across 21 states from Texas and Oklahoma to as far north as upstate New York, four received an EF-5 rating, a figure surpassed only by the 1974 Super Outbreak. In other ways, what is now known as the 2011 Super Outbreak rivaled its infamous predecessor of 37 years ago. There were more tornadoes. And, in an age when warning technology and communications far outstrips what existed on April 3–4, 1974, there were nevertheless more deaths.

The 2011 Super Outbreak alone would have set the year apart as a mile marker in weather history. But less than a month later, on May 22, another longstanding record got broken–and tornado records are rarely anything one hopes to see beaten. In this case, a mile-wide EF-5 wedge that leveled Joplin, Missouri, became not only the first single tornado since the 1953 Flint–Beecher, Michigan, tornado to kill over 100 people, but also, with a death toll of 153, the deadliest US tornado since the Woodward, Oklahoma, tornado of 1943.

This has been a year when large cities have gotten smeared, churned into toothpicks and spit out at 200 mph. Tusacaloosa, Birmingham, Huntsville, Joplin…if you survived the storms that trashed these towns, you were blessed. And chances are, you know people who weren’t so fortunate.

Rarely has the dark side of the storms that storm chasers so passionately pursue been on such grim and devastating display. This has been an awful tornado season, and that’s the truth. It has also been a spectacular one, and if many of the storms were man eaters, yet many others spun out their violent beauty harmlessly out on the open plains. Chasers this year have witnessed the full gamut, from April’s deadly monsters that raced across Dixie Alley to slow-moving, late-season funnels that meandered grandly over the grasslands.

For me, the season has largely been a washout. Family and economic constraints kept me mostly benched this spring, and the few times when I made it out west to chase were unproductive.

Not so, however, with my friend and chase partner of 15 years, Bill Oosterbaan. Bill has had a spectacular and a sobering season–and in this first-ever Stormhorn.com video interview, he’s here to talk about it.

The 40-minute length of this video requires that it be broken into four sections in order to fit YouTube requirements. It’s a lengthy process, and me being a novice at video editing–particularly with high definition–it has taken me a while to figure out how to make it work. This evening I finally had a breakthrough, and now I’m pleased to say that Part 1 is available for viewing. I will be working on the remaining three parts tomorrow, and I hope to have them available in their entirety on YouTube by Wednesday. [UPDATE: Parts 2–4 are now available for viewing.]

For now, by way of a teaser with some substance to it, here is the first part.

July 12, 2011 by
Filed Under: Guest Posts and Interviews, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Uncategorized, Video, Weather Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Diminished Whole Tone Scale Exercise with Pentatonic

The diminished whole tone scale (aka super locrian or Pomeroy scale) has been around for a long time, but it’s still a foreign sound to ears that are steeped in basic major and minor scales. For as many years as I’ve been playing it, it’s still not something I find myself idly humming. Nevertheless, it’s an extremely useful scale, full of colors and possibilities for chord superimpositions.

Think of the diminished whole tone scale as a mode built upon the seventh degree of the ascending melodic minor scale. For instance, a C melodic minor scale contains these notes: C, D, Eb, F, G, A, B, C. Start on B as the scale root rather than C and you’ve got a B diminished whole tone scale.

The scale’s primary use is with the altered dominant seventh chord, which it fits like a glove. The diminished whole tone scale contains virtually every common alteration of the dominant chord you can conceive of: b9, #9, +5, and +11. So when you see, for instance, an A+7#9, the A diminished whole tone is a scale option that should come instantly to mind. Like any scale, you can conceive of it as simply a linear repository of tones, all of which relate perfectly to the altered dominant chord.

dim-wt-w-pentatonic-exercise
The exercise on this page explores three of the many harmonic possibilities contained within the diminished whole tone scale. Click on the image to enlarge it. Each four-bar line sets a given scale against its respective altered dominant chord.

  • The first two bars use four-note cells to outline the seventh, raised fifth, third, and root of the chord. The chord tone is the last note of each cluster.
  • The third bar is a mode four pentatonic scale built on the b9 of the chord.
  • The last bar concludes with a simple lick that expresses the major quality of the chord, then hits two of its tension tone (#9 and b9) before resolving to the root.

    • .
    The purpose of this exercise isn’t so much to give you a great lick as to help you dig inside the diminished whole tone scale to see what it has to offer. There’s plenty more to discover, so consider this a springboard to further exploration. You’d do well to use some kind of harmonic accompaniment as you play this exercise, so you’re training not just your fingers but also your ears.

    Practice hard and have fun! And be sure to visit my jazz page for a large selection of other informative articles, exercises, and solo transcriptions that can help you develop as a jazz improviser. They’re all free, so dig in, learn, and grow with me musically.

    June 29, 2011 by
    Filed Under: Jazz Improvisation and Technique, Music, Saxophone, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Highway Work during Tornado Watches and Warnings

    Last Sunday, April 10, 2011, while chasing storms across central Wisconsin on a moderate risk day, my three teammates and I found ourselves stranded in a traffic bottleneck on eastbound I-90 just west of Oakdale. Ordinarily I would have viewed the situation as merely an inconvenience, but with a tornado-warned supercell bearing down on us, and with the radar showing pronounced rotation making a beeline for our location, the matter elicited somewhat greater concern. We could see what appeared to be the mesocyclone advancing over the hilltops. But we couldn’t do a thing about it, nor could any of the several hundred other vehicles that were backed up for a mile or two in both directions, courtesy of the Wisconsin Department of Transportation.

    Fortunately, nothing tragic happened. But it could have. The storm wasn’t merely Doppler-warned–it produced a number of tornadoes. We encountered some of its handiwork later on in Arkdale, consisting of a good quarter-mile-wide swath of shredded trees and badly damaged houses. Had the storm gone tornadic a few miles prior, it would have gobbled up helpless motorists like a giant Pac Man in an M&M plant.

    What highway department contractor made the outrageous decision to hold up traffic in a way that put hundreds of people directly in harm’s way with no escape? The storms didn’t form in an information vacuum. Three days prior, the Storm Prediction Center had already outlooked the area as a moderate risk. Forecasters had been consistently harping about the possibility of strong, long-lived tornadoes. The weather was hardly a surprise that caught road repair team leaders unaware. So my inevitable conclusion is that some boneheaded foreman was so hell-bent on getting the job done at all costs that he or she willfully exposed hundreds of drivers to a potentially deadly weather event.

    Such action is worse than irresponsible; it borders on criminal. I do not want the highway department making dispassionate decisions that risk my life and a multitude of others on behalf of a DOT schedule. How much time would have been lost rather than saved had the worst happened and the focus shifted from road work to emergency response? With scores of crumpled vehicles strewn along the highway and scattered across the field, how would the Department of Transportation have explained a common-sense-be-damned approach that resulted in multiple deaths and injuries?

    The incident I’ve cited is just one of innumerable highway closures that occur all across the Midwest due to road work that continues despite tornado watches and warnings. It’s not the first time I’ve encountered the practice, just the most infuriating, and yes, the scariest because of the immediacy of the storm. I doubt anything I say here is going to change the mindset responsible for such scenarios, but it deserves to be called out for its life-endangering lunacy, and this is as good a place as any to do so. It’s my blog, and right now I feel like using it to rant.

    WisDOT, what on earth were you thinking, assuming that you were thinking at all? Get a clue: Public safety trumps your deadlines. Evidently someone in your ranks felt differently last Sunday, choosing to put hundreds of motorists in jeopardy rather than suspend road work on account of a tornado warning. Does that kind of decision accurately reflect your policy? If so, then those of you in charge ought to be flogged at noon in the middle of the town square.

    However, a more constructive alternative would be for you to re-examine your guidelines for road work during severe weather, and to make whatever changes are necessary in order to put the public’s interests ahead of your own.

    April 12, 2011 by
    Filed Under: Life, Opinion & Editorial, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Uncategorized, Weather Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Tornado in Greensburg, Pennsylvania

    With sunshine and cold temperatures forecast through Monday and beyond here in West Michigan, I’d say we’re in the process of becoming nicely ridged. The GFS and NAM agree on a little trough digging into the southern plains on Saturday, with a surface low just southeast of the trough axis fetching moisture up into Dixie Alley. Shear is ample, as you’d expect this time of year, so maybe the South will see some organized storms. But up here in the north, none of that matters. Chilly and uneventful are the words for us this next week or so.

    So it’s nice to know that chasers got in a little early play Tuesday in Iowa. The Storm Prediction Center shows 18 tornado reports, including the photogenic Creston tornado: a beautiful, sunlit tube that a number of chasers captured on camera and video. That had to have been a sight to see, and I congratulate those of you who witnessed it.

    The big surprise came a day later, though, yesterday in Greensburg. No, not Greensburg, Kansas; Greensburg, Pennsylvania, 25 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Who would have expected a tornado out there in March in hill country? True, the SPC had issued a moderate risk for the east, but that was considerably farther south, and the affected area was teetering on the very edge of a light risk. The bulk shear certainly was capable of producing supercells, but I figured they’d just be hailers. I had written off the setup as a straight-line wind event.

    Yet a supercell drifting across the jumbled terrain of southwest Pennsylvania exhibited a pronounced mesocyclone that culminated in the Greensburg tornado–this in an environment where temperature and moisture that seemed inadequate to begin with dropped rapidly over the course of just a few miles. Lapse rates had to have been steep in order to sustain the storm in those conditions.

    As near as I can judge, the Pennsylvania supercell appeared to drift along some kind of warm frontal boundary, with just enough moisture and heat to sustain it and enough helicity to produce a tornado. VAD wind profiles at KPBZ were straight from the west at all levels; farther east-northeast, however, at KCXX, backing surface winds veered rapidly with height, providing decent low-level torque.

    But that was, I believe, in colder air. It strikes me as a pretty delicate balance that sustained the Pennsylvania supercell. Greensburg is located in the Allegheny Plateau in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, so perhaps the terrain may have influenced local boundary-layer winds enough to produce the Greensburg tornado. I can only speculate. The Plateau overall is mountainous, but when I look at photos of Greensburg, the town appears to be situated in a fairly level area. What the case is five miles southwest in Hempfield Township, where tornado damage was reported along Route 136, may be a different matter. I don’t know the area. However, the highway map shows curvy roads consistent with a rugged landscape.

    It’s fun to think about when there’s no other weather to contemplate, which right now there isn’t. But it’s on the way. It’s spring, the sun is higher, the Gulf is setting up shop, and Storm Season 2011 is moving in.

    ADDENDUM: Having looked at a few videos of the tornado in Hempfield since I made this post, I’m inclined to think that terrain wasn’t a factor. Looks like the right ingredients just came together on the mesoscale level. Interesting storm!

    March 24, 2011 by
    Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

    Yet Another Update: Huge Progress!

    I know I’ve been posting a lot of status updates concerning Stormhorn.com. Maybe I’m guilty of overkill, but I feel it’s better to let you know what’s going on with this blog than keep you wondering.

    And the fact is, a LOT has been going on. I should have scrapped my old NexGen plugin weeks ago, done the reinstall, and gotten on with replacing my image files. I didn’t because all I could think was, “Oh, man, all those files!” Nearly 500 of them. But as it turns out, reinstalling them hasn’t been nearly the prolonged hassle that I thought it would be–not that it isn’t time-consuming grunt work, but the process is moving along just fine. Much better, in fact, than I expected.

    Image Files Are Now Largely Restored

    That’s right–I’ve got the bulk of my galleries back in place. The work certainly isn’t finished, but right now, if you go to my photo page, you’ll see that most of what used to be there is back where it was. Well, sort of. I took the opportunity to do a little reorganizing, but that’s a good thing that brings a little more order to my collection. Anyway, just about all of my storm photos are back in place. Ditto my wildflower, bird, and other images. Check ’em out!

    The CopyFox Has Reopened for Business

    One of the worst parts of this whole debacle was having to take my CopyFox page and subpages offline. There was no alternative. Nothing looks worse than a copywriting business site that’s having communication issues!

    But huzzah! The days of woe are past and the time of jubilation is at hand! The CopyFox now has its very own website, which is how things should have been from the beginning. Bang the drums, bring on the jugglers and dancing bears, and let there be music in the streets! And by all means, check out the site at www.thecopyfox.com.

    What Still Needs Doing

    Now that I’ve got the bulk of my image files downloaded, I need to sift through my posts one by one and restore images to their proper places. There are also plenty of galleries that still need to be downloaded.

    But so much has already been accomplished. This blog is essentially well on its way to complete recovery. And even as I sort backwards through past posts, you may notice that Stormhorn.com is also moving ahead with new posts that will keep storm chasers current on the incoming spring weather season and equip jazz musicians with fresh food for thought and material for the woodshed.

    So there you have it. The news is all good. Thanks for your continued interest and loyalty to this site as it endures its growing pains. I’ve been amazed and encouraged to see that traffic has not only remained consistent through the worst of it, but now appears to be experiencing some impressive growth. Having changed to a new web host, I’m not sure yet how accurate my WordPress stats are–perhaps they are inflating the numbers and need to settle in a bit; but I think that Awstats is pretty dependable, and assuming that’s the case, then March is off to an awesome start.

    So again, thanks for bearing with me. And stay tuned, because repairs are being made rapidly at this point.

    Goodonya,

    Bob

    March 3, 2011 by
    Filed Under: Jazz, Storm Chasing, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

    First Day of Meteorological Spring!

    IT’S SPRING!!! Spring, spring, springity spring SPRIIIIIINNNG! O joy! O rapture! It’s springspringspringspringwonderfulwonderfulspring!!!!!!!!!!!

    And lest I forget to mention it–it’s spring!

    Oh, I know, you’re thinking I’ve lost my mind. Unless, of course, you’re a storm chaser or a meteorologist, in which case you know exactly what I’m talking about. As for the rest of you, forget about that old astronomical calendar that wants to make us all wait almost three more weeks for spring to arrive. That way of thinking is so passe, so limiting. Embrace a new outlook full of fresh, springy-sproingy possibilities. Think meteorological spring, which begins March 1–today!

    This is the day all you storm chasers have been looking forward to, and I know from reading a couple of your notes on Facebook that a good number of you have been doing air somersaults and cartwheels. You’re happier than Tigger on pot, and I don’t blame you one bit, because we all know what has just entered the room: Storm Season 2011.

    That’s right, boys and girls. Dust off your laptops, put your hail helmets in the back seat, and pour yourselves a nice, stiff shot of Rain-X, because it’s time for a toast. Here’s to moisture rolling in from the Gulf. Here’s to a higher sun, warmer temperatures, and longer days. Here’s to strong mid-level jets, deep lows, and gonzoid helicities. I wish you all safe chasing and classic supercells, my friends, and ample reason for steak and beer at the end of your outings.

    L’chaim!

    Let the games begin. It’s spring!

    March 1, 2011 by
    Filed Under: Life, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Uncategorized, Weather Tagged With: , ,

    NexGen Successfully Reinstalled–Moving Ahead!

    I’m delighted–and HUGELY relieved (yes, I just used all caps!)–to report that my reinstallation of NexGen is performing beautifully. I had to revert to an older version, 1.6.2, which was the last version in use before the 1.7 upgrade hit the streets and made my life a whole lot harder. Not that I’m blaming it for what appear to have been files that got corrupted when I switched Web hosts; just that version 1.7 has innate issues that I see no reason to deal with any longer. In this case, older really is better.

    Anyway, I’ve begun recreating galleries and taking the opportunity to do some reorganizing in the process. All posts dating back to November 29, 2010, now have either their nice, colorful singlepic images back in place or else have color thumbnails; and the music posts have thumbnails dating back considerably farther.

    There’s still plenty of work to do, but at last I’m on the right track and feel a whole lot better about things. My blog may have crashed, but it hasn’t burned, and I think the next phase of grunt work will go relatively quickly now that I’m no longer stuck on a treadmill with my image gallery.

    Man, I love it when solutions actually solve something!

    February 27, 2011 by
    Filed Under: Uncategorized

    Blog Update: Reinstalling NexGen

    Greetings, friends and readers of Stormhorn.com. This post is to alert you to a decision I had deeply wished to avoid making. Unfortunately, it has become clear to me that my NexGen plugin is broken beyond repair. With my pleas for help on the NexGen forum having gone unheeded, I have no recourse left but to uninstall my existing NexGen and then reinstall it. This means that all my NexGen images will have to go bye-bye, and the work will then begin on creating brand new galleries with my backup files.

    This move will of course necessitate massive amounts of work, which will include going back and once again rewiring image links that I’ve already sorted through after I moved my files.

    The long and short of it is…

    Images are going to be missing for a while

    There’s just no helping it. I will once again focus my efforts first on restoring the music exercises. This time, fortunately, I know exactly which files should go on which pages, and where on those pages they should go. But there’s no getting around the fact that restoring the music images is going to take a few days.

    Once the musical material is taken care of, I’ll once again begin to work my way back through the rest of my posts, beginning with the most recent, and insert images in their proper places. As with the music posts, I have many of the images for other posts cataloged, so should know where they go as I work through them. But that’s only true for about the last six months’ worth of material. After that, things will be slower going.

    Of course, with the new spring storm season arriving, most of you will probably be more interested in moving forward with current posts than in looking back. So it’s essential that I make this move now in order to reclaim NexGen functionality. I wish I had other options, but I haven’t found another plugin that manages images as effectively as NexGen, at least for my purposes.

    What particularly troubles me is, I have no guarantee that a new NexGen installation won’t create similar problems. But I’ve got to try. These ugly white tabs instead of singlepic images have made a hash of my pages, and I’ve got to fix that some kinda way.

    Again, once I’ve got NexGen reinstalled and my image gallery restored, I’ll be working on the musical material first, so that’s where you’ll see new images initially.

    I should add that this will only affect NexGen images. Other images should show up fine as long as links didn’t get broken in the recent move.

    Pray for me that this next step goes smoothly, and stay tuned.

    Bob

    ADDENDUM–A bit of GOOD NEWS to take the edge off the bad: It appears that the images on my music posts have survived the uninstall intact. I’m guessing that because I used the WordPress image button as a workaround, those NexGen images got duplicated in the WP media library. In any event, restoring the music images appears to be one significant issue that I don’t have to deal with. There are still a few things I’ve got to fix in my older jazz posts, but by far the bulk of the written exercises, solo transcriptions, and so forth are working and available.

    February 27, 2011 by
    Filed Under: Uncategorized

    Moonlight in Vermont: American Songbook Haiku

    “Moonlight in Vermont” is one of my favorite ballads to play on the sax. Written by John Blackburn and Karl Suessdorf and published in 1943, it’s a gemstone of the American Songbook with its sensory, impressionistic lyrics and evocative melody. Simple as it is, nevertheless it’s also a tune with a few surprises, notably its cadence to an altered V7/vi chord, which injects color into the otherwise static harmony of the A section; and also its six-bar form, again in the A section.

    Having finally given myself credit as a vocalist as well as a saxophonist, I recently learned the lyrics to “Moonlight in Vermont” and have been singing it quite a bit in the shower, driving down the road, and of course when I’m playing a gig. Naturally I got to thinking about that odd six-bar A section. It was the first thing that struck me about the tune when I acquired it years ago as a developing jazz musician seeking a nice ballad to improvise on. Why write a six-bar A section? Not that one can’t, not that one shouldn’t, but why abbreviate the usual, deeply ingrained eight-bar phrase? How strange, yet how effective.

    Yesterday the answer finally dawned on me in an inspired flash. I started counting syllables to make sure–five syllables in the first line…seven in the second…and, sure enough, five in the third…why, the song lyrics were written as a haiku!

    Now, I realize that this discovery is probably no news flash to some of you, but it was to me. Each of the three stanzas in the A section is a little haiku gem which, married to the limpid melody, flows beautifully and demonstrates just how evocative compactness can be. The  pentatonically derived A section, steadily descending, pausing at the end of each line, reminds me of a stream flowing through the woods, tumbling over little waterfalls and reposing in quiet, reflective pools before commencing the next phase of its journey.

    “Moonlight in Vermont” is a song of the seasons, painting the annual progression in three-line daubs of verse. The first tercet gives us “falling leaves, a sycamore”; the second stanza moves us into winter with “snowlight in Vermont”; and the last one brings us a summer evening filled with meadowlark song.

    The first half of the tune’s bridge continues with the word pictures while providing a digression into standard, eight-bar phrasing. The second half injects, for a brief moment, a human element into a tune whose romantic images have hitherto mentioned nothing of romance or of people.

    Songwriters who contributed to the body of music we call the American Songbook were masters at their craft, and “Moonlight in Vermont” is exquisite proof. For more on the tune, read this commentary in Jazz Standards. A Wikipedia article also does a good job of addressing the haiku aspect of “Moonlight in Vermont,” though it incorrectly attributes two inaccuracies to lyricist Karl Suessdorf. Vermont is in fact well within the range of the eastern meadowlark, and while sycamores may be uncommon in the state, the southern part lies within range of the tree.

    And that’s enough about that. I don’t know whether Vermont was moonlit last night, but it’s presently a cloudy Saturday morning here in Michigan and time I got on with my day.

    February 26, 2011 by
    Filed Under: Band, Jazz, Music, Saxophone, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Workaround for NexGen Problems

    I’ve found a solution to the problems I’ve been having with NexGen. After getting absolutely zero support from the NexGen forum–after making three posts over the last two weeks requesting, BEGGING, for help, I got no response at all–I decided to try a different approach that taps into my NexGen gallery without using its display feature for single images. Wouldn’t you know, my solution works!

    I’m not crazy about it as I only get itty-bitty thumbnails, not the larger and more attractive  singlepic images that I had in the past. But the thumbnails sure beat those stupid, ugly white tabs. At least now you know what kind of a picture you’re going to get when you click on it.

    So until I find a better way of doing things, I’m going to start replacing the tabs with the thumbnails. I just don’t see any other way right now. The NexGen forum has been worthless, and at this point I’m pretty put out with it. Being completely ignored has that effect on me. I should have just left the updates alone–things worked fine until NexGen version 1.7 came along. Now I’ve got over 450 images that are useless in the singlepic format, which is the format I prefer.

    Sigh. Vent, vent, vent…okay on with the show. Go check out my post on the Groundhog Day Blizzard to see what the new look is, at least for now.

    February 17, 2011 by
    Filed Under: Uncategorized
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