Kevin Selle
Wichita Falls, TX
Male, 55
I've been a broadcast meteorologist on television since the early 1990's. Happy to answer any questions about the weather or local TV news. Yes, I often wear sneakers on set just out of view of the camera.
Complicated answer, Richard, but a good question. There are quite a few and I really can't give a number off the top of my head. Easily more than a dozen It is complicated because different models offer different solutions. Some are short range, some are longer range. Some are US based, others European and Canada and Japan. To further complicate the issue some models are run as "ensembles" meaning they are run from the basic initial data but small variations are introduced to give different solutions. The basic input data is collected twice a day from about 900 upper air sites, or weather balloons, launched twice a day, noon and midnight Greenwich mean time. The idea is to take a snapshot of the entire planet atmosphere at the same time. Also, more and more data, from satellites and radar for example, is now ingested into the models to varying degrees. A shorter answer is, on a regular day I'll look at three or four.
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Yup! Any body of water. Glad you got to see one! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterspout
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We use the weather forecast models and the other tools mentioned in your other question to generate a forecast and then use television, radio and social media to share information.
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I usually answer this questions like this. I really don't like the use of the word "normal" in weather. "Average" is better. Over simplified, if the "normal temperature for this date is 75 degrees and we look a the records for the last 100 years. In theory half of those years the temperature could have been 50 degrees and half 100 degrees. The "normal" is 75 but it was never 75. So, there are swings in the global weather patterns constantly you're at one end of the swing! Hope that makes sense.
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Great question. A cold air event, like the current one, is a good bit less complicated than rain or snow. With a precipitation forecast there are more factors at play. In general a forecast gets fuzzier the further out it time you go. Broadly speaking the forecast starts with data gathered from weather balloons launched twice a day from about 900 sites around the world. That sounds like a big number but when you consider the size of the earth, and how much of it is covered by water, which is hard to launch a balloon from, that data is pretty sparse. The goal of the balloons is to take a snapshot of the atmosphere at a given moment. It is a fuzzy picture. Think of putting that fuzzy picture on a copy machine. The copy is fuzzier, then make a copy of a copy and so on. So the further out in time the more errors or changes that enter the forecast. Stay warm!
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Great question, Richard! Each storm and location is a little different. Much of the precipitation type is determined above the surface of the earth. The snowflakes form thousands of feet above the ground and stay frozen as they fall. A very shallow layer of air at the surface could be above freezing but not deep enough to melt the snow.
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No problem. Thanks for the information. It could be that a local weather source is using that term. “Officially” the term used by the National Weather Service is a tornado warning, and in some extreme situations a tornado emergency. Thanks again!
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