Another Thunderstorm Rant

It’s spring. Therefore, especially in the south, that means thunderstorm season. A system is making its way across the Gulf States and should arrive on the GA/SC coast Thursday, and we all know that that means: I get messages and even phone calls from people worried because of the way the risk is being depicted by local weathercasters …

It seems in recent years weather risks have become more and more often presented in ways that are, to my eye, exaggerated. As noted in other posts, your chances of being murdered by many of these weather events over 100 times less than your chances of being murdered by your fellow drivers on Abercorn (to pick on Savannah drivers).

As for the system itself, it’s pretty impressive on radar and causing problems across east Texas, Louisiana, and later today Mississippi and Alabama (here with NWS warnings as of Wednesday morning):

The GOES Lightning Mapper over the last hour shows a lot of activity …

However, the system should weaken as it moves east. Here is SPC’s forecast for Thursday, and the meanings of the categories:

One of my key complaints about TV/Media weather presentations is when they use similar terminology to the official reports, but with different criteria, especially when they use NWS graphics and map layers (and recolor them using different scales).

In short, pretty typical spring storm system. With some common sense not a big deal. Inconvenient, only hazardous if you do something dumb or are extremely unlucky. We will get rain, I’d hardly call 1 or even 2″ in Savannah a “high” risk of heavy rain as it’s not that unusual, although the usual spots that get street flooding might see ponding. The winds will be gusting up to 30 to 35 mph during the day Thursday. But we’ve had that several times over the last couple of months, but is worth noting as that has the potential to cause problems. As for thunderstorms, certainly will have some passing through, but as NWS Charleston notes “However, there may be several limiting factors in play in regards to the overall severe thunderstorm risk across the region.” Tornadoes? WJCL gets that right, with the risk certainly present but probably low as any that do form should be weak and short lived. WTOC is off base calling the tornado risk “moderate” (and their “wind 58+ high” is way off except perhaps briefly in a thunderstorm).

Bottom line: typical stormy spring day. Keep your weather radio on in case of warnings, and use some common sense on the roads in case of street flooding or periods of heavy rain limiting visibility (and braking!). There shouldn’t be any major power outages, but given the gusty winds a limb or two knocking out some areas might cause some scattered problems. In other words, April Rain …