This time of year in Minnesota is thunderstorm season. From now through June is the peak, though you can get lightning and thunder even in the winter (rarely). A severe thunderstorm rolled through the Twin Cities this evening. The kind of storm where things turn eerily green, very quiet, and then the warning sirens go off. Shortly after the hail starts it gets very dark and the rain pours down. Nothing but a lot of rain where I live but there were some strong winds and some funnel clouds (maybe even a tornado or two) elsewhere. No injuries and little damage apparently.
(Update: Seems there was "serious damage"....trees down in St. Paul and at least one garage destroyed in the west metro....some people without power.....when did we become such weenies? Not to minimize the personal hassle some people are feeling but geesh.)
I once had a girlfriend who loved thunderstorms.....a lot. Let me put it this way, if a thunderstorm was coming in and I wasn't home.....I got home. A few years after we broke up I had a lightning bolt go right through my bedroom...put a hole the size of a quarter in the ceiling plaster. If she'd been there I'd probably be married now. Or dead.
Anyway, I don't know what they do elsewhere, but here all of the local stations go off network programming when the storm gets within 50 miles. From then on it's continuous coverage. And not just any coverage, we're talking dissection here.
Bow shapes and rotation areas are breathlessly analyzed and zoomed in on. And man can they zoom now! If they ever zoom into my neighborhood I half expect some weatherman to make a crack about the wild kingdom also known as my yard.
Camera crews are dispatched to the storm path and about every five minutes we are treated to some poor schmuck in the middle of a deluge saying "It's raining hard here Bob". I wonder if those reporters are crazy or just low on the seniority list. Probably a little of both. Then it's back to zoom in, zoom out.
Once in a while they mix it up a little with some phone calls. Sometimes it's a government agency like a sherriff's department. Most of the time it's people who call in. "Yeah, this is Ole in Shakopee?....Yeah it's raining real hard here and the wind's blowing something fierce.....and there was big hail.....I saved some and put it in the freezer". At this point the team of weatherpersons, for some reason it's always a team of at least two now (must be all the zooming), puts on their biggest public service smiles and makes sure Ole isn't calling on a landline, as that wouldn't be safe.....dontcha know.
The last few years it seems the arms race has been focused on predicting the path of the storm. "This bow in the storm is going to hit town X at 6:13 and East town X at 6:15." Up until now they've been limited to showing the actual radar images and then having a program draw a timeline over it. Not any more. Tonite I saw one station show the real radar image and then actually show the storm's predicted path as a radar image. And then zoom in and zoom out.
Don't get me wrong here. Better predictions and information have saved lives over the years. But really, how much is enough? Somewhere in this country there are teams working on the next great thing in the weather wars. These people must be hunted down and, well, if not killed, at least stopped. Please, enough is enough.
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