Vacuum

Brrr! Cold overnight temperatures on Tuesday, January 22, 2013 in the Ann Arbor area.

The cold overnight temperatures in the Ann Arbor area are illustrated nicely by the Weather Underground's Wundermap for the area - here's a snapshot from 12:30 a.m. Brrr!

Assuming that school is on tomorrow (and not called off because of bitter cold), this should be one of the few days of the year I don't just send my second grader off to make it to school on his own.

If the Ann Arbor Public Schools were to be called off because of bitter cold, it would be following these guidelines: no outdoor recess if temperature or wind chill is below zero, and no school if temperature or wind chill is below 20 below zero. Their table, under "Unsafe Weather Guidelines":

Here's local school closing information:

WDIV, Channel 4, "Click on Detroit": Detroit School Closings. (11 reported at 1 am.)

CBS Detroit, WWJ 950 AM: First School Closings. (11 reported at 1 am.)

Fox 2 Detroit: School Closings (11 reported at 1 am.)

Hurricane Sandy - bookmarks and apps for your mobile phone

My twitter feed is blowing up with people discussing Hurricane Sandy and its likely impact on the East Coast. In the interests of having somewhere useful to drop things that come up along the way, here's a live blog of sorts of the event. I'll put all of my Sandy stuff here, rather than have it go over multiple other entries. The top of this is collected info; the bottom is the blog collecting things without much sorting except chronological. Whenever possible, I'll point to things that work well on mobile phones where screen size and bandwidth are an issue.

Power outages

My power outage map collection is a good point of reference. It's organized by state, with phone numbers and twitter feeds for utility company news and information. It loads relatively slowly because of all of the graphics, so you'll want to bookmark your utility's pages and save their phone number before the storm hits.

On Twitter, I'm following a list @vielmetti/poweroutage with about 40 utility company feeds all in one place.

Weather maps and forecasts

There's a lot of excellent coverage of the storm from weather sites like the Weather Underground, which has a Hurricane Sandy page with a comprehensive set of forecasts and weather details. The mobile site m.wund.com/tropical compacts the information down as far as it can go, omitting all advertising and extraneous text display.

Saturday, October 27

Emergency alerts for New York City: Notify NYC.

New Jersey traffic: 511NJ.org.

New Jersey: Coastal evacuation route maps. Check these ahead of time, they are large (megabyte plus) PDF documents not suitable for tiny screens.

How much will it rain? A 5 day QPF (quantitative preciptation forecast) from HPC.

How much did it rain? Precipitation analysis from AHPS.

Connecticut's preparations for the storm are on the hash tag #ctsandy.

WNYC's Storm Surge - Flood Zone map covers New York and New Jersey.

Is the Federal Government at work? Check the Office of Personnel Management site.

Friday, October 26

NJ.com has news for New Jersey; a mobile site is at mobile.nj.com.

Windfinder has global, detailed wind forecasts for wind speed, direction, and wind gusts. Their mobile site is http://www.windfinder.mobi/, and there's also an iPhone, Android, and Windows Mobile apps.

Reuters: 41 dead in Caribbean from Sandy.  11 in Cuba, 26 in Haiti.

The Middle Atlantic River Forecast Center shows a chance of flooding in the Susquehanna Valley.

The National Flood Outlook map shows a chance of flooding from coastal North Carolina north all the way to upstate New York, including the entire state of New Jersey.

Weather Canada's mobile site. An alert has been issued for Quebec.

New Hampshire: PSNH Outage List (for mobile).

Bangor (Maine) Hydro's mobile site.

Connecticut Light and Power has an outage report suitable for mobile phones.

FEMA's mobile app is available for iOS, Android and Blackberry. It contains "disaster safety tips, interactive lists for storing your emergency kit and emergency meeting location information, and a map with open shelters and open FEMA Disaster Recovery Centers (DRCs)." The FEMA mobile web site is m.fema.gov.

The Red Cross hurricane application is available for iOS and Android. "Monitor conditions in your area or throughout the storm track, prepare your family and home, find help and let others know you are safe even if the power is out – a must have for anyone who lives in an area where a hurricane may strike or has loved ones who do." 

Pepco has a mobile app for iOS, Android, and Blackberry.

The Wall Street Journal's Twitter list @WSJ/weather is a good collection of feeds.

SpaghettiModels.com has a full set of hurricane forecast information, with a compact hurricane forecast mobile site that's worth bookmarking on a mobile phone.

Hurricane #Sandy is being called a #snoreastercane if and when it hits the East Coast

It's a bit of a stretch, but the word "snor'eastercane" is supposedly a portmanteau of "snow", "nor'easter", and "hurricane". Credit to the Wall Street Journal for the name.

Odds are increasing that a hybrid “snor’eastercane” could make landfall near Greater New York early next week, with wide-ranging impacts affecting nearly the entire East Coast.

The Twitter hashtag is #snoreastercane and is in use already, with comments like this from @LoriG: "Unexpected consequence of global warming: having to learn the names of a bunch of new types of storms". Most of the storm traffic is on #sandy.

The other name for the storm is "Frankenstorm", from the Hydrometeorological Prediction Center extended forecast for Thursday, October 25, 2012:

THE HIGH DEGREE OF BLOCKING FROM EASTERN NORTH AMERICA ACROSS THE ENTIRE ATLANTIC BASIN IS EXPECTED TO ALLOW THIS UNUSUAL MERGER TO TAKE PLACE, AND ONCE THE COMBINED GYRE MATERIALIZES, IT SHOULD SETTLE BACK TOWARD THE INTERIOR NORTHEAST THROUGH HALLOWEEN, INVITING PERHAPS A GHOULISH NICKNAME FOR THE CYCLONE ALONG THE LINES OF "FRANKENSTORM", AN ALLUSION TO MARY SHELLEY'S GOTHIC CREATURE OF SYNTHESIZED ELEMENTS.

 

Meteorologist Jeff Masters from the Weather Underground has this to say on October 24:

Sandy: a potential billion-dollar storm for the mid-Atlantic, New England, and Canada

[...] These models are predicting that Sandy will get caught up by the trough approaching the Eastern U.S., which will inject a large amount of energy into the storm, converting it to a powerful subtropical storm with a central pressure below 960 mb and sustained winds of 60 - 70 mph. Winds of this strength would likely cause massive power outages, as trees still in leaf take out power lines. Also of great concern are Sandy's rains. Given that ocean temperatures along the Northeast U.S. coast are about 5°F above average, there will be an unusually large amount of water vapor available to make heavy rain.

Another set of forecasts from Cliff Mass have some good graphics (go there for those) - the takeaway prediction: 

Sandy is now a category 1 hurricane with estimated maximum sustained winds of 85 mph and central pressure of 970 hPa (see picture).  My community is all aflutter about this storm, particularly since our forecast models are not in agreement--some suggest the storm will intensify and head straight in to the Middle Atlantic coastline, some take it out to sea, and others move it out to sea before swinging it westward to hit New England or the Canadian maritimes.

Here's the spaghetti model on October 24, showing the wide range of possible landfalls from Delaware to Newfoundland. There are more spaghetti models for Hurricane Sandy on Cyclocane and more on SpaghettiModels.com.

Your guess may be better than mine as to where this storm will make landfall in the northeastern US.

Impact in the Caribbean: One dead in Jamaica (CNN).

Hurricane season, 2012

Each year is a new hurricane season, and each year the internet is a little different. Here's some things that are new that I've noticed.

Every single meteorologist is on Twitter (or close enough), and there's an ample supply of both local weather reporting and national weather forecasting to satisfy anyone's need to look at weather models for hurricanes to come. The word of the year is "spaghetti model", illustrated below, showing a whole series of separate tracks from different atmospheric models to predict a set of possible futures for the storm.

Another novel thing this year is the appearance of the hurricane app for your smart phone or iPad. Hurricane HD for your iPad focuses solely on hurricane tracking, giving you alerts and forecasts and graphical updates as conditions change. (I haven't used it, but the screen shots look good and straightforward). The Red Cross Hurricane App includes “I’m safe” messaging that allows users to broadcast reassurance to family and friends via social media outlets that they are out of harm’s way. Both have access to NOAA Weather Radio, which is one of the typical channels found on any of the scanner apps that are available.

If you are interested in listening to hurricane radio traffic, one good source is Radio Reference. In addition to listening to police scanners and fire service radios, you can also tune into the National Hurricane Center SKYWARN network and hear weather and condition reports directly from amateur radio operators in the field.

One thing that hasn't changed is the excellent hurricane coverage from Weather Underground, with the weblog of Dr. Jeff Masters a clear and precise account as conditions change. The comment board on this blog is notable for being well behaved and well informed, a rarity in this day and age. Weather Underground was recently purchased by Weather.com. There's no visible changes yet to hurricane information, but a few more TWC meteorologists are blogging on the wunderground site.

Here in Michigan, the worst we can expect from a hurricane is flooding from the far-north remnants of a storm. Others will not be so lucky. Do your best to be prepared.

Derecho of June 29, 2012, with time lapse radar video

ANN ARBOR (June 29, 2012) An intense storm called a derecho with long lived straight line winds passed to the south of the area today. The Disaster Mapping weblog entry 6/29/2012 Derecho has a good summary of the impact to the power grid from storm, which had knocked out power to over 3 million people as of 11:45 p.m from Illinois all the way to DC. Wind gusts of over 90 miles per hour were clocked in some areas as the storm blew through. This time lapse captures NEXRAD radar throughout the storm event, via Daryl Herzmann (akherz) at Iowa Environmental Mesonet.

NOAA has an interactive storm map of reports (SPC Filtered Storm Reports) from this event; this snapshot is an overview.

Another image from IEM show the maximum intensity of the storm for the whole day; it's from their Ring Of Fire Derecho post analyzing the storm.

The IEM Local Storm Reporter application captured this collection of watches and warnings across the affected area.

 

In Ohio, AEP Ohio reports over 500,000 without power and restoration efforts expected to take 5-7 days. Some 200,000 plus are without power in the Columbus area. AEP says this is the worst storm since Hurricane Ike. The Governor of Ohio declared a state of emergency for Ohio (PDF).

In Virginia, the Washington Post reports that Dominion Power has 275,904 of their 831,912 customers without power. 6 are dead in the aftermath of the storm.

In West Virginia, Governor Earl Ray Tomblin issued a state of emergency for the entire state following the storm. WSAZ News reports that 53 of 55 counties have power outages, and in some counties more than 75% of people are without power.

The Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang is live-blogging the storm.

The National Weather Service has a summary of the impact of the storm measuing peak winds across the affected area on their Facebook page. Additional reporting is from The Weather Centre, which has photos of one of the shelf clouds associated with the storm, and Weather.COM which has photos of the impact of the storm collected from Twitter.

Severe weather expected Sunday, April 15, 2012 for #annarbor area #miwx

The 2:40am map from Wunderground is a good marker of things to come for the Ann Arbor area.

As always, for DTE power outage information, the DTE Power Outage map is a place to go. Our old analog meter was replaced by a digital one, so there's one additional point of non-mechanical failure to watch for. The page on DTE outage claims is worth noting.

The 3am forecast from NWS: 

SCATTERED THUNDERSTORMS ARE EXPECTED AFTER 2 AM AS A WARM FRONT
LIFTS INTO THE REGION FROM THE SOUTH. THESE STORMS ARE NOT EXPECTED
TO BE SEVERE. THE STRONGEST STORMS WILL BE CAPABLE OF PRODUCING WIND
GUSTS TO 20 MPH AND PEA SIZED HAIL. THESE STORMS WILL MOVE TO THE
NORTHEAST AROUND 30 MPH.

SPOTTER ACTIVATION WILL NOT BE NEEDED TODAY AND TONIGHT.

Ann Arbor Rec and Ed notifies for cancellations on a page worth watching. 

What do you tune into during severe weather?

I get all the news I need from the weather report. Here's where I get the weather report from.

Twitter, to chat with people who are also in their basements. The local hash tag is #miwx for severe weather. I have a list @vielmetti/weather that I follow for the news.

Weather Underground for radar and forecasts and what not. I like the classic version of the user interface, which is busy and deep and which I know well enough to navigate. The minimalist mobile version of the site is starkly unbusy and works fine even on a relatively dumb smart phone.  

SKYWARN, the local ham radio emergency weather channel. The local repeater is N8DUY, located near I-94 and M-14 in Scio Township, available at 145.150 Mhz or via the Radio Reference relay online. This is the single best source of real time news during events.

The DTE Energy outage map is good for tracking storm damage starting about 30 minutes after the storm has gone through - you start to pick up which power outages will take a long time to fix. Note in this map below from Sunday, May 29, 2011, that the storm damage near Lansing ends at the DTE boundary; that doesn't mean there isn't more storm damage, only that I don't have a map of the other.

Television, which we don't have for over the air reception. WDIV Channel 4 "Click On Detroit" has useful email weather alerts and a Detroit JustWeather page, and WXYZ Channel 7's #backchannel on Twitter always has good chatter from the news desk there.

 

AM/FM radio. Locally the best bet is WWJ "News radio 950", with traffic and weather together on the 8's; it's intended to be listened to while you are driving, and they do talk

Weather band radio, which speaks in a synthesized scary voice. There are receivers that only turn on when there is an alert in your area, but I don't have one. Details from National Weather Service Detroit about the network of weather radios in the area.

Weather facsimile. Again, never have managed to do this, but if you have the right radio you can decode faxes with weather maps on the that are broadcast over the air. Also known as WEFAX, the technology dates from the 1920s. Details if you are good at such things from National Weather Service marine forecast services.

You should be able to get real time notifications of severe weather even if you have no power, no cell tower, and no Internet; that's why you have batteries for your radio.

Related articles

Power Outage Mapping

What do you tune into during severe weather?

DTE substation fire and Ann Arbor power outage, June 28, 2012

Severe weather expected Sunday, April 15, 2012 for #annarbor area #miwx

AnnArbor.Crowdmap.com - collaborative analysis of storm impact

AnnArbor.Crowdmap.com is an online system which has been collecting storm reports from the May 2011 flooding in Ann Arbor, as well as having in it previous information from past flood events and other incidents in Ann Arbor where there was widespread problems.

Crowdmap is a tool that allows you to crowdsource information and visualize it on a map and timeline.

I've typed in a bunch of these, but if you notice a news report of flooding, sewer spills, landslides, closed roads or fish flopping around on the road please add in a dot on the map with a link.

The image shows storm-to-date stormwater related incidents in Ann Arbor and the surrounding area - I will leave it to the world to decide how far away "surrounding" is, but certainly the Huron River watershed is in scope, and I suspect that the area to watch is roughly the size of the Arborwiki catchment basin.

More about Crowdmap at Tech Cocktail.  A 2009 Business Insider story covers eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's investment in Ushahidi, the system that Crowdmap was built out of. 

Lightning damage closes Ann Arbor Northside Elementary School on May 26, no one injured

Lightning hit a brick chimney at Ann Arbor's Northside Elementary School on Wednesday at about 4:15 p.m., sending bricks flying 100 feet through the school pickup area. Fortunately, no one was hurt, as the area was vacant except for a staff member's vehicle which was damaged by flying brick.

I was aware of this when it happened because the lightning strike was powerful enough to cause the power grid to bounce, prompting comments on Twitter and speculating on the exact location. Phil Proefrock's photo published to Facebook tells the story.

Northside will be closed on Thursday for building repairs.

Media: Ann Arbor Public Schools news release.  AnnArbor.com. Ann Arbor Chronicle, reporting on the civic news ticker that the chimney "crumbled" based on the school board report.

Lightning information: 24 hour lightning summary from Strikestar.

Photo from Phil Proefrock pending permission to include here.

April 10/11 2011 Lake Michigan storms: Mesoscale Discussion 402

Severe storms and damaging winds are possible across the upper Great Lakes from the storm on April 10/April 11 2011. This map is from Mesoscale Discussion 402.

Edward Vielmetti watches for severe storms.