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The all time record high temps for LA are the result of faulty weather stations

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Libertas:
Said that a number of times.  Storm of July 2011 at the lake ripped up trees and toppled them and others cut in half...still to this day describe it as a severe thunderstorm with straightline winds...but straightline winds do not shred trees, and many residents reported a funnel....and a 11 girl at a campsite died from a big tree branch that fell.

I'll tell them where to stick their Doppler!

LadyVirginia:
What's in it for them to not say it's a tornado? That they missed it?

We had a horrible storm once with a lot of damage and huge trees uprooted and tossed into streets and they said it wasn't a tornado.

Pandora:

--- Quote from: LadyVirginia on July 26, 2018, 09:33:13 PM ---What's in it for them to not say it's a tornado? That they missed it?
--- End quote ---

Maybe ego, maybe money.


--- Quote ---We had a horrible storm once with a lot of damage and huge trees uprooted and tossed into streets and they said it wasn't a tornado.

--- End quote ---

You can see the funnel cloud with your own eyes and unless their instruments showed tornado, to them it wasn't a tornado.

Libertas:
As far as MN & WI go...I have never seen a storm come in and see/hear a weather guy say anything but "Doppler shows signs of possible rotation here" or "severe weather (wind, hail, tornadoes) possible...only once a spotter/LEO makes an official report do they locally officially declare a tornado...most official announcements come from the NWS(NOAA) and they have a 30% success rate (70% are false alarms)...couple that with people being desensitized to over-the-top predictions from meteorologists locally and nationally (Storm of the Century, naming every storm now even winter ones) and you have a problem.

To issue an official warning, a tornado has to be seen on radar.

Check this out -

There's a balance between trying to detect and warn for every single tornado while keeping the number of false alarms low. The more tornado warnings you issue, the higher chance of a false alarm, which increases public complacency.

It is easier for a forecaster to verify a tornado warning for a supercell on days with a potential for long-track, violent tornadoes. Those signatures are usually distinct, straight out of a meteorology case study.

Tornado warning performance and lead times are higher on these relatively few, volatile days, according to a 2008 study by Kelly Keene, Paul Schlatter, Jack Hales and Harold Brooks of NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory and Storm Prediction Center.

However, as Ian Livingston of ustornadoes.com found, about 90 percent of tornadoes in the U.S. from 1950-2016 were weak, rated EF0 or EF1 and can occur in more marginal environments for severe thunderstorms and/or display less distinct radar signatures.

Often, the environment spawning these weaker tornadoes is only marginally supportive for tornadoes, and radar signatures are weaker or more subtle.

Other challenges forecasters face in these situations include:

Radar is often unable to see rotation in the lowest elevations near the ground, particularly for distant storms, since the beam gains elevation with distance.
Nighttime tornadoes are hard to verify as they're happening unless the tornado is illuminated by lightning, power flashes are seen, or damage has already happened.
Short-lived tornadoes embedded in squall lines may quickly form, then dissipate, and their signatures may be less pronounced.
Tornadoes in squall lines or high-precipitation supercells may be obscured by rain, and, therefore, hard to identify by spotters.
Spotter networks may be more dense in, say, Oklahoma, but far less in sparsely-populated areas.
Outside of the core severe weather months during spring and early summer, the environments are more marginal, the public is less aware, and perhaps fewer spotters available.
As meteorologist Jonathan Belles wrote in May 2017, in an attempt to address the false alarm problem, lead times for tornado warnings have decreased from 13 to 14 minutes at the beginning of the decade, to around 8 to 9 minutes in the past year.

NWS forecasters now wait until a tornado has begun before issuing a warning more often, according to Dr. Harold Brooks, senior scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory, in a presentation given at the 28th Conference on Severe Local Storms in 2016.

In essence, this comes down to a question of whether the public can stomach missing a few more weaker tornadoes (EF0/EF1) in order to lessen the overall tornado warning false-alarm rate.

http://downdraft.caps.ou.edu/reu/reu08/Final%20Papers/Keene_final_paper.pdf

Even now, even if a spotter report confirming a tornado is on the ground, meteorologists go get radar confirmation.

To me eyeballing it and hearing of others eyeballing one is more valuable than "official" pronouncements.

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