Michigan Camp Meeting 2017

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Weather Preparedness

Jason Whitaker

1. Weather Preparedness: Summer

Dear Father in Heaven, we thank You for this opportunity to study Your wonderful creation and the weather that You've given us, whether it be good or bad, and we ask that You would bless this presentation and everyone that has come.

Alright, how many of you here know who I am?

I did take some of them but my name is on the slide there.

For those of you that don't know me and weren't here last year, my name is Jason Whitaker.

I'm actually by trade a maintenance manager for a company here in the area and I do weather work on the side.

I've storm chased both professionally and personally for about 15 years.

I started back in 1999 when I met a guy by the name of Rob Dale.

Does anybody recognize that name in here?

Rob Dale is kind of an interesting gentleman.

He wrote the software that we use to interpret the data from radar to a computer.

He's been doing this since he was 14 years old.

But, ironically, he can actually explain weather to a child and they understand.

He taught me a lot of what I know and got me into storm chasing.

I used to be scared of thunderstorms and severe weather back when I was a kid.

I think being scared of it led me to want to actually find out more.

When I met Rob, he got me into storm chasing.

I later became an amateur radio operator.

I've worked here at Camp Me as a storm monitor.

I've worked for Gratiot County with the emergency manager on weather issues and I've always worked in the community I live in.

I'd like to someday but I feel that I should serve the community where I'm at at the moment.

Even if I'm at work I would work with Mecosta County which is where I work.

Now as we go through this presentation you're gonna if you've been here before you'll see some information you've seen before.

This is a very basic course this is not storm chasing.

I tried to get the Weather Service to let me teach that they were not real nice about it so I said well I'll just do my own thing.

And these presentations were actually originally given to my CERT group in Isabella County about 2 years ago.

The conference asked me to do this last year.

I did the summer weather safety and they wanted to do more so I'm going to do winter weather safety on Thursday, which I think you'll enjoy.

I know it's summertime, we're not wanting to think about winter, but it's a good time to plan ahead and get ready.

I don't want to get too deep, but we'll try here.

So we're going to talk first about weather terms and you'll see this again Thursday if you come.

It's usually issued with general information relating to an upcoming weather event.

This does not mean that it will necessarily be an event, it's just advising you to pay attention and be thinking about being ready.

Watch means that there are conditions that are favorable for a weather event to happen.

You hear a thunderstorm watch, tornado watch, a high wind watch, and there's many others.

They're going to change these a little bit, but I haven't gotten any information, so I'm not able to present that at this moment.

A warning means a weather event is currently happening or will be in your warned area soon.

Now I find a lot of people get watch and warning confused.

I sit at work and the tones go off on the radio and they go, oh there's going to be a tornado.

Now, we want to talk about some elements of summer storms.

There's many elements but these are the basics.

A lot of summer thunderstorms and events have strong winds.

A lot of damage, power outages and such become of them.

Number 2, lightning which is actually, ironically, 1 of the biggest dangers to you and I.

Most people do not get struck by lightning.

I actually know of a couple different cases where people have been struck by lightning and survived.

Now we were just dealing with heavy rain the other day here.

I was telling some people before we started that we had somewhere between 3 and a half and 4 inches in this area between about Friday morning and Sunday morning.

Hail, and then of course the tornadoes that we sometimes see in Michigan.

Now, good news here, tornadoes do not happen as much in Michigan as they do out west.

Now summer thunderstorms have a lot of different things involved with them.

You usually have moderate to heavy rain with a thunderstorm and wind over a few minutes or a few hours.

I want to stop here and just give you an idea here.

You can have a thunderstorm system that moves very slowly and may dump a lot of rain, have a lot of wind, and be very damaging over maybe 3 to 6 hours or more.

A lot of times you'll see 1 that pops up out of nowhere.

I call them popcorn storms or instability thunderstorms.

They may last less than 20 minutes, but I've seen them actually produce semi-tornadic rotation and other things that are not very savory and can be very dangerous.

You got your storm conditions that can range from a mild thunderstorm up to a straight line wind event or even a tornado.

Now sometimes, I've seen this a couple times, you will have all of these in 1 storm and in a very small area like maybe a mile wide stretch you'll have some rotation, you'll have straight line wind damage, and you may have even a tornado touchdown.

Now summer storms can bring things like heavy rain and flash flooding.

Flash flooding is not so much a problem here.

Be real careful at night if you're driving.

You can run into situations where the roads are flooded you don't know it until you get into it.

We'll talk about a little bit more here later on in the presentation.

And of course we got strong winds, lightning, hail, and power outages.

Now How many people in here think wind is dangerous?

I'm going to tell you a story that I just witnessed a few weeks ago.

My wife and my daughter and our dog were walking in town where we live and we got out of the door and it started to get a little windy.

I get my phone on, I look at radar, and I'm like, oh, the storm's north and south of us, big deal.

We keep walking, the wind picks up to about 20 miles an hour, but I'm like, that's not good.

2. Weather Preparedness: Winter

Dear God, we thank You for this opportunity to come together once again and learn about Your creation, about weather, and how to stay safe.

We ask that You would bless each 1 here in Your name we pray, Amen.

So anyway, I was thinking as I was pondering what I talked about on Tuesday, I think that we covered a lot of different things.

1 of the things I hope I made pretty abundantly clear is the fact that Michigan weather is very unpredictable, predictably under predictable.

You'll hear me say that probably 10 times.

And some of the information I'm going to discuss today we discussed on Tuesday but I felt it was important to review it because it is important.

We talked about winter weather terms, we're talking about winter weather today.

We split this into 2 parts basically because there's too much to do in 1 hour and a quarter sessions.

It's like trying to teach college level science or college level calculus in an hour.

This is only the tip of the iceberg as far as weather goes.

There are classes you can take through the Weather Service in the spring if you go on the Weather Service's website.

They have a whole list of locations across the state where you can take Skywarn training.

I encourage you if you're interested to take it.

You probably need to take it more than once because there's a lot of information.

It's about 2 and a half hours and there's a lot of information to absorb.

They try and make it real information friendly but it's still a lot of information.

So as we continue on here, we've got our advisory.

Now an advisory is always issued with general information relating to an upcoming weather event.

In the wintertime you get winter storm advisories, wind advisories, stuff like that, freezing rain advisories.

Of course you have a watch and we have all the watches and such that go with that.

It means conditions are favorable for an event to happen.

Remember watch, you're looking for, looking toward.

Then we have a warning which means a weather event is happening currently or will be in the warned area soon.

And usually they issue warnings for only a short amount of time, less than 6 hours.

A watch can be for days, even weeks sometimes.

In this area, they issue flood watches every year.

A warning is usually a short-term, short-duration event.

Now, they may issue a warning back-to-back on something if there's still that condition existing, but they have a time frame on a warning of, you know, you see a winter storm warning from 08:00 in the morning until 6 at night.

Now, we have elements, as we do with summer storms, we have elements of winter storms.

Heavy snow sometimes comes with winter storms.

And ice is really the greatest danger of all in a lot of ways because think ice.

Ice equals weight on trees, power lines, buildings, such like that.

Travel is impacted when you get a little bit ice, roads get slippery.

Even walking can be impacted really, really quick with ice.

And you have such a small temperature range in which it happens that it can be, you know, you can be driving along in 1 place and the road's wet and a mile down the road it's solid ice and you run into big problems.

We'll talk about that in a little bit here.

Usually with winter storms and during the winter you have cold.

Cold can be very dangerous also, but cold is usually more of a long-term thing.

Notice on here you see the various colors here.

I actually took the screenshot of 1 of the radars I was looking at that day.

And You can see there's just such a variation there.

You know, it's just really quite an interesting little thing.

Now winter storms can bring a lot of different things with them.

Their severity can be anything from moderate to heavy snow over a few hours.

Depending on where you live, if you guys live on the west side of the state, you said you live in Niles, isn't it?

A few miles down the road, it's just light snow showers or nothing.

The further inland you get, the less chance you have of heavy snow, but we do see significant snowfall sometimes and people on the lake shore don't see any.

Blizzard conditions with blinding wind, driven snow that lasts for hours or sometimes several days, in order for it to be considered a blizzard, a true blizzard, it has to be 35 miles an hour greater wind over a sustained amount of time.

How many have ever been in an actual true Michigan blizzard?

Many winter storms bring low temperatures and the lower your temperature is the worse it becomes because you have wind chill and so on.

Heavier blowing snow, severely reducing visibility.

Under a quarter of a mile to complete whiteout.

You don't know where you're going if you can't see the lines on the road, especially if it's snowed a lot.

I was at my buddy's house in Brighton, Michigan, and I was coming back to Lansing area where I live.

It was just kind of snowing a little bit.

Further north I went and west, the worse it got.

I was, I figure, I was driving on ninety-six.

I figure I was driving between the 2 lanes.

All I could see was the little markers they have on the far side of the road, you know.

That was how I was judging where I was at.

It took an hour, a trip that should have taken me about an hour took me better part of 3 and a half.

I didn't get home until way early in the morning.

Not by choice, but you know, It is what it is.

There's lots of different types of storms.

And these are just kind of general categorizations that we kind of use.

Series

Weather Preparedness

2. Weather Preparedness: Winter

Transcript

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