The National Weather Service has relayed some reports that there have been sightings of funnel clouds in association with the showers passing across northern Illinois.
These funnels pose very little danger. They tend to only last a couple minutes and very rarely touch down. That said, if you do see any funnels (they usually look like thin ropes), call your local law enforcement and be prepared to take shelter if a funnel appears that it will be touching down.
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12 comments:
Thats odd. Do they issue warnings when these are spotted?
Sometimes, but usually they don't last long enough to get a warning out. Again, they VERY RARELY touch down to begin with, let alone do damage. -ES
Hey! This is my shift! :)
Eric just has good work ethic. Maybe he just likes to help us out =P
I guess SOMEbody has to keep tabs on me.
Hehe, see how it is. Eric has been off since wednesday and now he chimes in . Uh huh. heheheh. We missed you eric.
I take it those were cold air funnels.
Yes, NWS does issue warnings for cold air funnels. They did in my county a couple of years ago and it caused a minor PR scandal because everybody thought the NWS office had gone totally off its rocker.
NWS claims it has no choice; confirmed cold air funnel spottings "technically" meet the criteria for issuing a warning so they claim they have to. Lots of people (including me) think they shouldn't.
If NWS warning criteria actually do require that warnings be issued based on cold air funnel spottings then maybe NWS needs to specify its warning criteria more carefully.
Cold air funnels are barely more than "dust devils" that happen to occur up near the cloud base, so you can see a condensation funnel when they happen. They are not tornados (my opinion).
Indeed, they were cold air funnels.
It seems like this could be a point of discussion, so I'll throw in my two cents.
I think it's a difficult judgment call. One the one hand, the NWS folks know that the likelihood of one of these things even reaching the ground is extremely remote. That by itself is enough reason to not pull the warning trigger.
However, there's also the public perception issue. WI Wx Buff, you've obviously had experience in this arena in regards to cold air funnels. As somebody who's weather savvy, you know they're nothing to be too concerned about. However, there are probably a lot of people who would find seeing one of the funnels to be rather unnerving. I got a phone call from a friend a couple summers ago who said everybody around him was "freaking out" because of what turned out to be a bunch of scud. As you can well imagine, there's that fine line between saying "we know, but don't worry about it" and "we know, and we're going to alert you to them."
Throwing even more complications into the mix, the NWS has verification goals looming over their shoulder. You don't want to warn on something that you don't think is going to touch down, yet what if this is the one very rare time that it does?
I've asked Chicago NWS about warning on cold air funnels. That should give us some insight on that side of things.
I feel like I'm spamming the comments section. :)
Their response:
"It's a judgement call on warnings for cold air funnels...but it would be extremely rare that we would warn for one here at [our NWS office]."
Ah. I guess maybe the Chicago and Milwaukee NWS offices make that call differently (another complication of living at the intersection of 3 different NWS offices' warning areas..).
I think (if I'm not mistaken) Rockford used to have its own NWS office, but when the NWS consolidated offices it got the axe. Is that right, or am I misremembering?
Eric had mentioned to me that there had indeed been an office in Rockford. It's funny you mention that, because I just found out a little tidbit about the office consolidations the other day.
Currently, the offices are called WFOs, or Weather Forecast Offices. In Alaska, however, they still have those localized offices, which are called WSOs, or Weather Service Offices. They do the same stuff as the WFOs, apparently, but don't have a NEXRAD. I'm going to guess that Rockford had a WSO.
I have to confess, I said "NEXRAD" instead of "radar" just for the sake of having another acronym. :)
Heh heh.
I once worked in an office that used so many acronyms that even the people that worked there couldn't even keep them all straight.
There was a wierd practice I noticed.
Every once in a while when reading a memo or other document (especially those coming from Management) you'd hear a chorus of people howling, "Aarrooooooo!"
"Huh?"
When I finally asked what that was all about, I was told that when there were too many acronyms in a written document, the shorthand comment was itself an acronym (natch), "ARU" which stood for "Acronyms R Us" - pronounced, "Aarrooooooo!"
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