Getting there…
Best to start at the beginning… I met up with Tyler Allison of AllisonHouse and Adam Ball who is a Meteorology student at DeKalb, IL. They met me in Omaha on Thursday night and we stayed at a Microtel that had been open for less than 24 hours. They had all sorts of trouble when I checked in – but patiently waited it out. They were pretty nice about the whole thing. We received two wake-up calls the next morning just because “they weren’t sure the first one got through ok.” Apparently they were preparing for the absence of wake-up calls that I’ll talk about later.
We got to Denver around 3 or 4 in the afternoon and it was “colder than a witch’s tit in a brass bra.” I don’t know where that phrase comes from but I got it from my dad. Sorry if it offends you – I certainly mean no offense. At any rate, it was a balmy -12 degrees upon our arrival. On this trip, I learned that Tempur-pedic pillows get very hard when exposed to cold temperatures. We also had a very hard time keeping the frost from forming on the INSIDE of Tyler’s Subaru Outback.
The Ice Breaker…
The ice breaker was much better than last year. I think this was because I arrived later that night and not right when it started. It was good to walk around and bump elbows with the names that I never had a face for. The food Tyler sprung for was great – the nachos in very patriotic colors. A funny moment happened when I met Dr. Gold and he said, “Oh, you’re the South Dakota chaser…” and I replied back, “Heh, yeah – one of the two.” (I didn’t think about it till now but I forgot – there’s one more of us that I know from Stormtrack. So there’s three chasers that I know but I’m sure there are more. Sorry Kyle!) Some other people I chatted with were Chris Collura, Dan Robinson, Jeff Piotrowski and some of the others that visited the Allison House booth as that’s where my pseudo-hangout station was.
Jeff Wear’s parents were also in attendence. Though I didn’t know Jeff at all and only vaguely remember him from last year’s convention, I thought it was really great that they were there. For those of you reading that don’t know about Jeff Wear, he passed away last year in a tragic car accident while he was returning from a hurricane chase in….I think it was Florida.
The Conference/Speakers…
This lineup seemed a bit more scientific this year. Some of the talks were way above my head. I told this to Dr. Gold as we were walking back to the conference room on the last day. He seemed to apologize profusely but I said back to him, “I’m not a meteorologist – I’m a computer scientist. If I can’t understand it from one perspective, I’ll try to look at it from a way I can understand. I really appreciate your talks as it just shows me that there’s a whole lot more to learn out there and I like that!” I’ll save my review/opinion of the conference till later.
My favorite speakers and their topics were Jon Davies talking about Cold Core Low systems, Dr. Charles Doswell with Chaser Safety and Tim Marshall’s Damage Assessment. I’ll just do a quick synopsis of these – some will be in my notes that I’ll post later on down.
Jon Davies – One of his first statements was that 2005 was the year of the cold core low systems. Thinking back through my chases and looking through his photos, I believe a lot of my chases were cold core low systems. I’ll have to see if I can go back and get the data from those days to make sure of this. Anyways, he did a great in-depth analysis of various cold core low events. He also gave some various common factors in cold core setups.
Dr. Charles Doswell – Call him Chuck whenever you’re around him – I saw him kind of scold someone when they called him Charles!! He’s like me in that everywhere my name is written, I like it to be Edward but in informal chat or forum stuff – Ed. Anyways, he talked about chaser safety. He started off showing us a picture of an R.C. in a black pickup or SUV tailgating these old people to get to a storm. He also showed an email that was full of mispellings and it was very sad how this person stated he’d do anything “for the safety of the public” by getting to a storm. Yet he drives like a maniac. Very dispicable behavior on R.C.’s part. The rest of his talk was basically: here’s a list of bad behaviors; don’t do these; if you do, you are hereby open for punishment and responsible for your actions. There were a couple of things on his list that I’ve done. I felt a little bad about what I had done. I knew I shouldn’t have been doing it when I did it. So it’s all down to me making the conscious decision to be safer…regardless if I think I can make it or not. He also made the strong point that just one mistake can costs lives and cost storm chasers their hobby as a whole. By this he meant that politicians might get involved and then you’d have to get licenses to chase or chasing might be outlawed in all areas or certain areas.
Tim Marshall – Wow, I learned so much stuff about damage assessment. All of it was pretty common sense stuff too – like the nail that anchors the frame to the foundation is bent to the northeast or no nail is there but a scratch mark off to the northeast is there. Which way did the house come off the foundation – from the southwest and moved northeast. He also went into detail about how such simple things as j-bolts and plywood on corners of the house can strengthen the wind resistance from 70 mph to over 100 mph. These might not be the exact numbers, but it’s about the same idea. One interesting observation he made after the Oklahoma City tornado in 1999 when he went back to see how the houses were being rebuilt and some of the houses weren’t being built any better – in fact worse! This is most likely due to the person thinking, “Well, another one will hit in a few years; I might as well just get by cheap.”
From talking with various people through the course of the conference, I think there was a little dis-satisfaction because of the level of scientific discussion. A generalization was made that most of the people attending the conference are rookie-ish chasers who want to know the absolute basics of forecasting (simple, simple, simple stuff), how to outfit their car with various equipment, easy tips for getting good photage, etc. I don’t know if I share the absolute generalization but I did agree that we should have a couple more basic discussions. Though I respect Dr. Gold and his knowledge to the utmost, I don’t think his practical forecasting talk was very practical. He made references during this talk to his other talk on Potential Vorticity and used such words as entrainment and geostrophic forces. He also made a major discount to CAPE, roughly stating, “Counting CAPE is almost as worthy as counting the socks in my drawer.” While one should never rely their target on CAPE alone, I do think that it is a better indication for rookie chasers – he might have just been reinforcing that you shouldn’t base everything on CAPE. Many people in the crowd weren’t meteorology majors and the one sitting at my table had a hard time with it as well. I don’t know, maybe more of the crowd was understanding the higher level talks. The “crowd” that I talked to didn’t.
The only other major complaint I had was that the hotel was freezing cold and it wasn’t just from when the power went off (more about that later). There were interesting zones in the hotel – some were mildly warm to comfortable, while others were chilly or freezing. It was to the point where I had to put on my winter coat on the last day.
I did enjoy the breakout sessions the last day however I wished they were shorter. Some speakers had an hour or more to talk and went even farther over their talk time. Of all the breakout sessions, I enjoyed Jon Davies’ session the best. He talked at my level most of the time and used a lot of surface observations to reinforce his discussion.
I can’t go without making references to the power outage in Denver. Apparently it brought down the whole grid in Aurora and might have been caused by the extremely cold temperatures and everyone having their heat on full blast. It was pretty wierd. I was shocked to find that there were absolutely NO emergency lights. The elevators stopped with people inside them. The outage lasted approximately 30-45 minutes.
Coming home…
After battling the frost on the way to Denver, we were determined to figure out how to stop it from forming on the way back. We applied our extensive meteorlogical knowledge and came up with the idea that it was being caused by having the air conditioner on the setting where it takes in the air from within the car and keeps it heated rather than taking the air from the outside and heating it. Basically, by the humidity of our breath, we were increasing the humidity of the air within the car as it was recycled through the system and back into the car again. By taking in the cold air that contains way less humidity and can last longer without fogging up the windows. So in short, there’s only a couple options to solving this problem: heat up the window (impossible because the cold air passing by it on the outside), heat up the air on the outside (ok, you tell me when you can heat up the outside air and I’ll show you this bridge I’ll sell you…), or you can reduce the humidity on the inside of the car by: breathing less or switching the intake to the outside air.
Our ride home was pretty eventless. We listened to a little of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. We stopped at a Burger King where we had dinner and then I drove to Omaha from there. We then picked up my car and headed back to the Microtel we stayed at on Thursday night.
Now this was a funny experience. We check into the hotel and they give us the room. Again, they took a long time because they’re still inexperienced with the whole system. So we are walking up to the door of the room and the guy comes running down the hall, “Stop, that room won’t work!!” Apparently, they had checked us into a room where someone was already staying. Disaster averted, we went back and got another room. He reswipes the credit card and puts in all the settings again, swiping the hotel keycard again and we get our room. We go up to our room and notice that there is a “Do Not Disturb” sign hanging on our room. Thinking that they couldn’t have made the same mistake twice in a row, we went ahead and swiped the card in the door and opened it up – only to hear the solid clunk of the door against the slider lock that can only be applied from inside the room – someone was already in this room too!!! Back up to the desk we walk with all of our bags and stuff hanging off our shoulders. The guy at the front desk apologized profusely and then the front desk phone rings. It was the people we woke up. Hahahaha. The guy apologized to them, and then told us that he can’t believe he checked us into another occupied room and that there were only 5 rooms in use that night!! He went through the whole process again and got us into another room and made sure it was not occupied. We got into the room, laughed about the whole situation for a while, and then went to bed knowing that there would be absolutely no chance of further screw-ups. Needless to say, we did not receive our requested wake-up call in the morning. We only slept in by an hour and fifteen minutes. Fine for me, but for Tyler and Adam – they had a long drive ahead of them.
We said our goodbyes and I later took off in my car back home to South Dakota. Iowa was crawling with Highway Patrol. It seemed like I couldn’t go 10 miles without seeing a cruiser. I stopped at Chick-fil-A in Sioux City, IA and got some sandwiches for the wife and I for lunch. Another two hours on the road and I was finally home.
Notes…
Pictures…
Other pictures…
From Dan Robinson’s website,
