1998

1/5/98 Safeway

The Safeway on Arapahoe Rd. in Boulder recently remodeled its produce section. On top of the display cases there are small speakers with strobe lights mounted on them. Just before the water spray (which supposedly keeps their vegetables fresh) begins, a very realistic sound of thunder comes from the speakers and the strobe lights flash. It's worth the trip to the store just to see this.

1/5/98 Andey McFarlin

Andey's band was nominated a few months ago for their songs having a rather strong natural disaster theme. Andey, however, seems to be stepping up into the upper echelons of weenie'ism. She not only heads up the group and goes by the name, Taz Fujita, but her homepage, http://home.earthlink.net/~andey/main.html, would make any weenie with a meteorological background proud. Recently, Andey was looking through her BMG catalog. There was a section called "Hot Movers". Andey thought it said "Right Movers"! And to cap this rather verbose schpeel off, here are the lyrics to her band, Hypocenter's, latest song.

INFLOW
music and lyrics by Taz Fujita, 1997


You see it coming like a nightmare
Darker than your fears
You scream as the gust front overtakes you
But no one hears

Wall cloud forming right above you
You feel the pressure drop
Look up and watch the sky start turning
Pray that it will stop

CHORUS  Take a ride straight to hell
                    On the mesocyclone carousel
                    Caught in the inflow - no escape

A loud roar deafening your ears
A sound you've never heard
You run but the wind's too strong
Tasting high speed dirt

Suddenly the ground disappears
Sucked in and spinning
Higher and higher in the updraft
Hell is just beginning

CHORUS

Whipped around like a rag doll
In the churning storm
Naked, cold, bruised and battered
Clothes and flesh are torn

Carried for miles away from home
No way to be saved
Finally you escape its grip and fall
Cold, wet ground your open grave

CHORUS

Sucked up and flung to your final resting place,  you have become
another piece of debris!

1/12/98 Ian Baker Mission Research

Bake was so inspired by Taz Fujita's INFLOW that he decided to write his own song.

CHASERS ON A BUST
lyrics by Ian Baker, 1997 (tune to the Doors, RIDERS ON THE STORM)


chasers on a bust
chasers on a bust

no debris only dust
that wind was just a gust

we need gas in the bus
i'll corepunch if i must

chasers on a bust

convergent zone ahead
cell growing-no its dead

vacation days are gone
my wife sits home alone

been in the car so long
nerves in my ass are gone

chasers on a bust
yeah...

1/12/98 Kim Elmore NSSL

Kim and DeWayne Mitchell were walking across a parking lot when Kim looked up in the sky and saw two crossed vapor trails overhead forming a huge "X" in the sky. Before he knew what he was saying, he blurted out, "Look! 'X' marks the vort max!"

1/12/98 Tom Peterson, Trevor Wallis

From The Best and Worst of Everything, Parade Magazine, Sunday December 28, 1997, Page 10.
		Initially from the Rocky Mountain News,
		"BEST EXPERIMENT"

		"If you are caught without an umbrella when it starts
		to rain, will you stay drier by running to shelter
		instead of walking?

		Thomas Peterson and Trevor Wallis, of Asheville, N.C., 
		both climatologists, calculated that running made one
		44% drier over 100 meters (about 328 feet).

		To test their findings, they measured off a 100-meter
		course and waited for it to rain.  They wore
		identical dry clothing that had been weighed before
		the test (they wear the same size) and wore plastic
		bags under their clothes to trap any water that might seep 
		through.  Peterson walked the course, while Wallis ran.
		Afterward, they weighed the clothes again.  The result:
		Wallis' clothes were 40% drier.

		Frankly, we'd take a cab."

3/2/98 Mark Bogner KSNW-TV

A Thunderstorm Lover's Year, written by Mark, a TV meteorologist in Wichita:

february: we are in the day 2 general thunderstorm outlook! we are in the day 2 general thunderstorm outlook!
march: why won't that moisture make it farther north than the red river before another @!^%*^% cold front comes through. how many days are in this month, anyway?
april: ok...where's the severe weather...i'm tired of talking about it...bring it on...whats that on the radar? snow? NOOOOO!
may: finally! the sweet sound of the weather radio at 12:30 a.m....the call into work at 1 a.m....i LOVE my job!
june: ok...can't i just get ONE good night's sleep? i wonder what would happen if i turned the ringer off on the phone. i think my wife has forgotten my name...
july: northwest flow SUCKS...i havent had a good night's sleep in months, the wife took the kids and went to her mother's...she was mumbling something about "weather widow"...
august: now THIS is getting rediculous...whatever happened to hot and dry in august? if i see one more meso, bow or lewp, i am going to puke...
september: hey...it has actually been a week since i was called in...the wife is back from her mother's and actually remembers my name...the kids have grown...what were their names?
october: AHHHHHHHHH!
november: i wonder if there is any thundersnow in that?
december: tired of snow now...maybe i will get a tornado video for christmas...
january: there has NEVER been a tornado reported in this state in this month...can't we just skip january?
february: we are in the day 2 general thunderstorm outlook! we are in the day 2 general thunderstorm outlook!

3/23/98 Greg Stumpf nssl

Greg bought the 1998 Sports Illustrated Swim Suit edition. Now those of us who know Greg, know he didn't buy it for the swim suit pictures. And our theory was confirmed while he was at the Wittmeyer house. He bought it because of the "Weather Girls" article which highlighted some TV Weather Ladies across the country. The magazine ended up with Hodanish...

3/23/98 Mark Branson csu-atmos

While devising a spur-of-the-moment NCAA basketball pool, in the presence of at least 6 other people, 2 of which are the WWW board instigators, Mark explained that the winner of this pool would be the one with the "cumulus best record". The cumulative decision was to nominate him...

3/30/98 Brian Smith NLU

There is a Shreveport cable TV channel that broadcasts the (live) video of the Shreveport radar and the audio of the NOAA weather radio station. When explaining why he knew he should go into meteorology, he said that when he was young, he would sometimes watch the channel even when there were no echoes, just for fun.

3/30/98 Chuck Doswell

Chuck's (old) license plate: DEL X V

4/13/98 Matthew Biddle ou-geography

On Sunday (March 29) Matt got special permission to leave the hospital, where he was for several days to chase storms.

4/13/98 Steve Sponsler

Steve, who works for NASA, sent out an email note with a meeting agenda to a number of people. In the note, he stated, "PLEASE NOTE THE HIGHLIGHTED ITEMS. KSC WILL HAVE HEAVY PRECIPITATION IN THIS THIS MEETING." Of course, Steve meant to write that KSC would have heavy 'participation' in the meeting...

5/4/98 The Weather Channel

For their funny and clever bar commercials at The Front:

5/4/98 NASA

Getting tired of those stacks of old baseball cards? Want something new and exciting? Well, NASA has just the thing for YOU! Radiation Budget Trading Cards!! Collect all six! I'll trade an Albedo card for an ERBE one. Thanks to Prof Dave Randall for the alert on this AND for the cards!

5/4/98 ?????

Our Holton who art in Washington
Hallowed be thy Name
Thy vorticity come
Thy divergence will be done
On the surface
As it is at 500mb,
Give us this day our radiative transfers
Forgive us our forecast misses
And forgive those who forecast against us
Deliver us from baroclinicity
Lead us not into heat sinks
For thine is the perturbation, the instability;
	and the K index forever.

	-- M. Buckingham 1979
	-- Head Priestess

5/26/98 Matt Rogers NCAR-RAP

Matt and Greg Thompson were chatting about chasing in general the other day, especially because Greg went the day before. Matt insisted that Greg take him chasing because he would bring good luck on the next chase. When asked why it should be believed he's "good luck", Matt replied it's because an anagram of his name is "great storm"!!

Thompson was jealous and was trying to come up with a good storm anagram using his name. After coming up empty for several days, he asked Matt to try his brain on Greg's name and Matt produced the following: "progeny, storm hog".

6/8/98 Chris Landsea noaa-hrd

Chris has stipulated to his wife, Donna, that when they have children, they must be named after famous hurricanes (Camille, Opal, Frederick, Andrew, etc.)

6/15/98 Damon Hynes

Damon submits a new Weather Channel "The Front" commercial with some of our better known storm chasers:

Erik Rasmussen to glazed over blonde: "...So you see, I've been trying to tell them for years that it's not a cascade. You can have a meso develop at the same time as the tornado..."

Over in the corner, it's Tim Marshall: "...Gene, I'm telling you, we fix a pulley to the axle of our trailer, run a 120V transformer up to it, and we can use it to power the Weather Channel DSS..."
Gene: "...Yeah, but we better patent it before Faidley makes one, paints it black and calls it StormGenerator(tm)."

Sam Barricklow at the bar: "...Here's a QSL card from some guy in New South Wales, this one is from Santa Fe, Argentina -- I was in Pampa, he was ON the pampa..."

Doswell and Stumpf: "...Landspout" "Gustnado" "Landspout" "Gustnado"

Tom Grazulis, behind a yellowing pile of local papers: "...according to these guys, a parrot was found fifty miles away, screaming 'wow, what a rush!'...that's patently untrue, later studies by Fujita documented that a parrot will only fly thirty miles before losing it's ability to speak."

And here's Warren hitting on the waitress: "...and before I got into chasing, I was the guy they called when a nuclear reactor was getting hot. I'd go into the reactor vessel and put the graphite rods in manually. For a while, I put out oil well fires..."

7/20/98 Robert Hogenmiller Jr & City of Omaha

Note news article below:
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) In flat-as-a-cutting-board Nebraska, where the horizon is broken only by an occasional stand of trees and a grain silo, some folks have gotten the urge to go vertical.

They're building a giant archway spanning Interstate 80 in the middle of the state and drawing up plans for a 610-foot stainless-steel tower resembling a tornado near Omaha.

"We don't have anything that's vertical here,'' said artist Robert Hogenmiller Jr., explaining why he is designing Vortex the Tornado Tower, a $35 million contraption that would use lasers to create the illusion of a spinning twister.

7/20/98 Jerry Straka OU

This gem appeared recently on the net. Jerry was discussing an issue and ended it with the following:
		"P.S.  FOR FUN--I TOOK SOME RUBBING ALCOHOL AND
		SPREAD IT ON OUR PORCH IN A LOCATION WHERE 'WEAK'
		VORTICIES WERE BEING SHED OFF OUR HOUSE...I LIT THE 
		RUBBING ALCOHOL AND THE VORTICIES AMPLIFIED
		DRAMATICALLY AS THEY WERE STRETCHED BY THE HOT FIRE
		--A FEW EVEN ROARED A BIT AS THEY REALLY WOUND UP
		--SOME REACH HEIGHTS OF 5 TO 8 FEET--AND LASTED UP TO
		30 SEC--THEY WERE REALLY FUN TO WATCH--BETTER THAN ANY
		TORNADO CHAMBER VORTEX I EVER SAW--"

7/20/98 Ian Wittmeyer csu-atmos

Ian was in the kitchen making dinner with daughter Hannah the other night and this is what was overheard from the adjacent family room. Hannah asked to go to Target to get a present for a friend. Replied Ian, "Well, you should have thought of that when we were at the STORM yesterday." Enough said.

8/10/98 Cheryl-Ann Tan

Cheryl-Ann was reportedly at a friend's house eating dinner when a CG struck about 2 miles away. Cheryl-Ann apparently got so excited, she shouted "CG!" and overturned the dinner table--along with all the china dinner plates AND beef steak. The total damage cost: $211.36.

8/10/98 Rachel Gavelek wisc

The other night, Rachel was chatting online with her boyfriend and mentioned what a terrible typist she was. Her boyfriend replied that she's an "HP" typist. She immediately read that as "high precipitation" instead of the "hunt and peck" her boyfriend meant so she sat there wondering what a type of supercell had to do with her typing!

10/5/98 Ray Zehr csu-atmos/cira

While attending the CSU-UNLV football game on Saturday, 26 September, Ray was savvy enough to make sure that he had in his possession the morning's latest observations and projections of hurricane Georges' location and path, so that at a moment's notice (usually during timeouts) he could whip them out for perusal

10/12/98 Joe Terry nasa-gsfc

With all seriousness, Joe voiced his preference to leave a bachelor party early to make it home in time for midnight so he could record the day's precipitation.

10/19/98 Ray Zehr & Chris Velden csu-atmos/cira & uw-cimss

Here's a gem that is long overdue. About three years ago Ray, Chris and some others were sitting in a sidewalk cafe in Coconut Grove, Miami. As the girls walked by they would rate them by Dvorak T numbers.

10/26/98 Kelley Wittmeyer csu-atmos

While explaining to Don Dazlich and Mark Branson that son Avery was sick, she said that she had tried to give him "anvil" as a fever reducer. It may have worked had she tried "advil".

11/9/98 Matthew Biddle ou-geography

He's at it again; FROM THE HOME OFFICE IN PINK, OKLAHOMA - - - THE TOP 10 PAPERS THAT THE AMS REFUSED TO ALLOW TO BE PRESENTED AT THE 1998 SEVERE LOCAL STORMS CONFERENCE THIS PAST SEPTEMBER IN MINNEAPOLIS:

10. "Willy Willies in Wagga Wagga and a Big Donk in the Bushy" - Severe Weather in Australia.
09. "Insignificant Tornado Chasers" - New Activities of the Tornado Project.
08. Penn State Bites! (no further info).
07. "Who Has the List of Tow Truck Phone Numbers?" - Highlights From SubVORTEX '98.
06. "Helicity - Schmelicity" -the Problems with Forecast Indices.
05. "It in fact sounded NOTHING at All Like a Freight Train" - Oral Histories of Human - Tornado Interface and the Occasional Hallucination.
04. The Direct Correlation Between the Incidence of Wildflower Images that have Migrated into Presentations and the Age of the Presenter.
03. "F-5 MY ASS!" - Contemporary Problems in Tornado Damage Assessment.
02. "Bulk Richardson" - is NOT a Professional Wrestler.
01. The "Muscle Test" versus the RUC and NOGAPS - Preliminary Findings.