NWS Confirms 4 Touchdowns Confirmed in SW Michigan

0:00Well, of course, everybody talks about the weather, very few people can do anything about it, and I'm not suggesting our next guest can do anything about it, but they do a generally speaking and marvelous job of letting us know when bad weather is approaching. Something went wrong with the twisters. We're going to get into that as well as just general information. The very latest from the general manager of the weather channel radio network of which WJR is a proud member. You've heard me speak with them before, and it's a pleasure and privilege to welcome you back meteorologist Scott Laramore Scott Paul, good to have you, how are you? I'm good. You had your hands full as a general manager of one of the greatest weather services ever. And the national weather service has confirmed four tornadoes touched down in Southwest Michigan, all this happening on Friday night. But the thing that the thing that people will talk about, you can't blame them, you understand

1:03this, that though the weather service gets it right, national weather service, 99.99% of the time, and they've gotten so much more accurate, somehow or way or another, these tornadoes at least in one area caught everybody by surprise. Can you kind of help us better understand that, Scott? Yeah, absolutely. So the way we like to do severe weather events now is we like to talk about the event day or two before it happens, kind of jump up and down and remind people that it's coming, it's coming, it's coming. And then the day of what we really like to happen is the storm prediction center come in and issue a tornado watch, right, which means conditions are favorable. And usually that happened hours before tornadoes start to develop. Sure, because just to remind everybody, the watch comes first, then when all the things line up and we know it's going to happen pretty much in certain areas of the watch, it becomes

2:07a warning. Just wanted to catch people up on that. No, and that's a very good reminder and right on the money. Exactly. And the storm prediction center is a national entity. And so their meteorologists are looking out for like old zones of states and they issue these watchpots. The local national weather service meteorologists are responsible for issuing the county by county warnings, the tornado warnings, the severe thunderstorm warnings. So what happened Friday afternoon is the national entity, the storm prediction center. Just minutes before we started a tornado there in Southwest Michigan, they issued what's known as a mezzo-scale discussion. And so it's like a kind of an announcement to the local national weather service forecast offices. Hey, something's caught our eye, something's going on here. But they did not issue a watch, you know, a tornado watch out. They felt it was too localized, too isolated and event.

3:08In fact, they mentioned that in their discussion, the storm prediction center did. So just minutes before the first tornado occurred there in Cass County, there was a mezzo-scale discussion that the storm prediction center put out. And then it was like playing catch up the rest of the day. So the cadence was kind of off. We didn't go into the day thinking that Southwest Michigan would see a high-end EF3 tornado. I don't think any meteorologists was really thinking that. That morning our focused area was more of a traditional tornado alley area on Friday. This was the Union Lake, Union City tornado. And I got to tell you, this is fascinating, Scott, because I had no idea of the separation of responsibilities of the National Storm Prediction Center, the National Weather Service, and whoever else you mentioned in there. I had no idea that the duties to decide whether or a watch, a tornado watch, or then somebody

4:13else that decides it's a tornado warning, I had no idea those were split responsibilities. They are split and they have been for quite some time. And I'd have to say it's a good system. The Storm Prediction Center, their meteorologists are looking for more national signatures, areas of responsibility include the whole country. And so they're already, they're always scanning the country to try and see where these ingredients are bubbling up and coming together that could support tornado storms. And then sometimes the Storm Prediction Center will contact the local National Weather Service Office, literally ring them up and talk to the forecaster on duty that's responsible for issuing the local warnings county by county. And we'll alert them of these things. If that happened, I don't know if that happened or not. There's still the survey teams out that are still looking from the local National Weather Service offices to get a true picture of what all went down and exactly what time down to the minute.

5:14So some of those are still being looked at, but it was kind of eerie just minutes before that first tornado warning came out, which, you know, till the 12 year old boy there, the Storm Prediction Center, the National Entity kind of issued this discussion to kind of start to flag what they're seeing. And it was literally one cell, you know, cells that stand alone from, from squal lines, you know, squal lines kind of have a linear look to them, these supercells that hit us Friday were kind of lone wolfs. They were off by themselves, and it initially looked very disorganized, that EF-1 initially looked very disorganized. The EF-3 looked terrible on radar. It was a classic supercell that had all the earmarks of a beast kind of a storm. And you know, I don't know if you saw all the video of that there on the shoreline, but there were multiple vortices revolving around the main vortex, which you don't typically

6:14see in Michigan, right? And you don't typically see that kind of stuff in tornado alley, like, and all of it. Is this, is this a harbinger of things to come? Is, you say, we don't usually see those things in Michigan, has something changed that now means we may see those things again in Michigan? Well, I think this was the earliest EF-3 we have on record. I'm not, you know, there's a line to be drawn, you know, clearly we don't know everything about tornadoes, and clearly I'm not suggesting that we have accurately measured the start of the day for every EF-3 that has happened in the state of Michigan. But this was the earliest EF-3 on record for Michigan, March the 6th. Wow. Now you mentioned and in the Detroit news front page story Ann Snabs and Max Reinhardt quoting from Union City quoting the storm prediction center, talking about the tornadoes were, quote, so localized that it was very difficult to detect in advance an issue of a watch prior to the storm's development, that's a quote.

7:16But you did use the term too localized. What does that mean? Too localized to be able to understand it. So generally the storm prediction center will put a watch up when they're expecting multiple tornado events over an area. They, they did not do that on Friday. They did, they issued that mesoscale discussion highlighting to the local national weather service offices, you know, what they were seeing. Then the local national weather service offices started issuing tornado warnings, you know, the Northern Indiana office started issuing there on the, on the state line of Southwest or Michigan. And so they, I think they issued about six different tornado warnings that, that afternoon. But the first one had very little, no warning on it. And then I think the three rivers one had about a 13 minute lead time and then I think the mostly time was the last tornado warning of the day, which was about a 15 minute one. The union city had more like a 10 minute warning, 10 to 12 minute warning on it.

8:20So generally, you know, when they see these tornado vortex signatures on radar, you know, whether local weather service will pull the trigger on issuing a tornado warning, whether or not they have ground truth or not. In this case, we were getting ground truth also. I appreciate you. I appreciate your help on this and always doing the excellent job you do meteorologist Scott Laramore. He's the general manager of the weather channel radio network. They're not the guys in charge of saying there's a tornado watch or tornado warning, but they are the ones who help us tell you about them here on WJR and they will continue to do so. Scott, thanks for your help. It's my pleasure. We continue in focus on WJR. We continue in focus on WJR. We continue in focus on WJR. We continue in focus on WJR. We continue in focus on WJR. We continue in focus on WJR. We continue in focus on WJR. We continue in focus on WJR. We continue in focus on WJR. We continue in focus on WJR. We continue in focus on WJR.