Only in Iowa can you get snow days AND tornado days. Although the snow days have a much higher threshold for cancellation than they did growing up outside of St. Louis. I don't recall ever getting out of school early in Missouri for tornadoes though. Schools in Des Moines are closing 2 hours early, which is probably better than cars and school buses full of kids stuck in traffic when the End Times arrive.

The action is supposed to start at 3pm today, I'll make sure the lawn chairs are out, GoPro is charged, and beer on ice for the show and my future YouTube fame.

Weather alerts are the norm these days. It is a form of entertainment. Here on the Coast there are clear warnings for Hurricanes. The forecasting is improving over the past two decades. Gives plenty of time for Cantore to stand on the beach.

Down here in Alabammy the schools will close early if there is a good chance of severe weather.

It really changed after the April 27, 2011 super-outbreak that had tornado warnings firing up about 30 minutes after school started, then lasted off-and-on until late in the evening! Many children were in cars and busses on the roads during times they should have been in tornado shelters!

I used to scoff at such things, but I've had too many close calls to do so anymore.

Edit to add: Just checked the SPC's convective outlook for that area, and they damned sure SHOULD close the schools early and get the kids off of the roads! They are in a strong "Enhanced" probability zone, which is to say 4 out of 5 on the danger scale!

quote:

Originally posted by bronicabill:


Edit to add: Just checked the SPC's convective outlook for that area, and they damned sure SHOULD close the schools early and get the kids off of the roads! They are in a strong "Enhanced" probability zone, which is to say 4 out of 5 on the danger scale!

Yeah, its going to be exciting. We had a storm blow through this morning which would be an eye opener for any given day, it had a nice bow to it and they were saying radar indicated 1" hail but I don't think any actually fell. The weather folks say that was nothing compared to what is supposed to come through this afternoon with some good humidity and heat fueling things up.

Ryan Hall has a very good YT channel on severe weather.

He goes live at 2PM CDST today.

I’m 300 miles due south of you in the panhandle and same here they close schools even if it’s severe wind warning. Some years ago some kids got hurt in a wind storm a bus turned over or something.

Praying for a calm hurricane season

quote:

Originally posted by bronicabill:
Down here in Alabammy the schools will close early if there is a good chance of severe weather.

It really changed after the April 27, 2011 super-outbreak that had tornado warnings firing up about 30 minutes after school started, then lasted off-and-on until late in the evening! Many children were in cars and busses on the roads during times they should have been in tornado shelters!

I used to scoff at such things, but I've had too many close calls to do so anymore.

Edit to add: Just checked the SPC's convective outlook for that area, and they damned sure SHOULD close the schools early and get the kids off of the roads! They are in a strong "Enhanced" probability zone, which is to say 4 out of 5 on the danger scale!

TN used to do it quite a bit. My daughter’s school got absolutely hammered the year we left.

One local station, KCCI, in Des Moines has footage of wind turbines that were snapped in half…one on fire.

We had a similar dismissal at my school last year when it was apparent the storms would hit right at the time we’d be putting kids on busses. It was a smart move as there ended up being quite a bit of damage.

Now they’re headed our way, so just going to hunker down for the night. We got 4.5” of rain just today…

All safe in Scubaland. We had some wind, a pinwheel blew over outside. Lots of places I have been in Iowa have been hit hard, sounds like Greenfield, IA took a direct hit, there is at least 1 confirmed dead from a tornado flipping a car.

We had Reed Timmer himself in Iowa!

quote:

Originally posted by ElToro:
<<snip>>
Praying for a calm hurricane season

Agreed! I feel bad for folks in hurricane prone areas when they have to board up their houses then head inland on the deadlocked highways! The only upside to hurricanes, and I don't mean to make light of them, is at least you get a few days warning of the danger approaching. With naders, you get a heads-up hopefully a few hours ahead of time, and with warnings it's normally only minutes!!!

In some cases, like the Rainsville EF5 back on April 27, 2011, they almost didn't get a warning at all because all the weather guessers were focused on much more populous areas and almost missed what developed in Dekalb County! That one was so strong it sucked the top off of an underground tornado shelter, stripped the asphalt off of roads, stripped grass and dirt off of fields leaving trenches up to 3 feet deep, broke solid concrete front porches into chunks, etc. I drive through Rainsville all the time going to visit my daughter in GA, and the evidence is still there in many places, 13 years later!

There is drone footage of Greenfield, Iowa and it shows the most damage I have ever seen from a tornado. Lord have mercy on those good folks

quote:

Originally posted by Scuba Steve Sig:
We had Reed Timmer himself in Iowa!

That cracks me up (not the tornado, that is devastating). The funny thing is that the wind is blowing 5000mph and the damned useless windmill is barely turning at all. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever seen one of those eyesores turning beyond very slowly.

I've seen them whipping around on numerous occasions.

Their speed is very controlled,

Demand makes a big difference,
They will shut down if there is no demand, they will slow down if they spin too fast and they will shut down when operation is too prohibitive.

The tip of a wind turbine blade can travel at speeds of 75–100 mph for smaller blades,

150 mph for larger blades, and up to 180 mph on windy days. The speed of the blade tip is called the tip speed, and it depends on the size of the blade.

Larger turbines have larger blades, which means the tip has to cover a greater distance in each revolution.

This means that smaller turbines rotate about 15 times per minute, while larger turbines only rotate about 7.5 times per minute

The best we were allowed to do is put a book over your head and sit facing a wall.

Wind turbines do not stand up well to tornados

This is drone footage of the devastation of Greenfield, Iowa. If I understand correctly this is the same tornado that was filmed destroying the wind turbines shown earlier in this thread. https://youtu.be/5yOxfSFyU04

My Dad's job took us from Hartford to KCMO for 10 years long ago when I was a little kid. Forecasting was nowhere near as sophisticated in the early 60s as it is now so there were no "tornado days" called. Instead, the first floor of the school was about half a flight below grade and there was a large (I supposed it was reinforced) room on that level that we were herded into if a tornado was near. It was also the fallout shelter if Krushchev had done more than bang his shoe and we definitely had those drills.

The wind turbines evidently feather their blades when wind is above 55 mph to protect them. Not sure if that is automatic or the electric company has to direct that. They are still feathered today, most likely until they are all inspected. The debris field spans into several other wind turbine fields so I imagine they have to all be inspected before letting them spin again. The wind turbines that were hit were southwest of Greenfield and the storm hit them first before Greenfield. Here is some excellent drone footage from Reed Timmer:



What impressed me is how far away the tornado was from the one wind turbine that tumbled over. You can see the blades turning, yet they are feathered, so it is likely upward or downward wind spinning them and it is the far outer wind speeds that tumble the tower. No idea what those towers are rated for wind speed, but they look stout driving down the road. Perhaps the turbine head and the feathered blades caught enough wind to cause that as opposed to the pole itself.

They have confirmed four dead in Greenfield and are calling it an EF3 initially. Another woman died in the county where the wind turbines are when her car was blown off the road.

quote:

Originally posted by bronicabill:


In some cases, like the Rainsville EF5 back on April 27, 2011, they almost didn't get a warning at all because all the weather guessers were focused on much more populous areas and almost missed what developed in Dekalb County! That one was so strong it sucked the top off of an underground tornado shelter, stripped the asphalt off of roads, stripped grass and dirt off of fields leaving trenches up to 3 feet deep, broke solid concrete front porches into chunks, etc. I drive through Rainsville all the time going to visit my daughter in GA, and the evidence is still there in many places, 13 years later!

Joplin, MO was like that. An EF5 that killed 158 people 13 years ago today. It pulled the concrete parking lot stops out of the ground and knocked a 10 or so story hospital off its foundation enough they had to destroy it. We drove through there on the way to Texas a couple years ago, you can still see where it went through. I think that thing was a mile wide, they could see the debris ball on radar in St. Louis.

Few people had basements in Joplin because the frost line is so shallow. Almost everyone in Iowa has a basement because of our frost depth. Interviews coming out of Greenfield describe people who didn't have basements going to neighbors that did. Much of the houses there are 50+ years old with concrete block basements, but they worked good enough. Few are brick. It appears the courthouse and historic downtown was mostly spared, the tornado missed it be a block or two.

Will still take the tornado ridden Midwest over Shakey California any day