How much difference does eight minutes make when a tornado is about to touch down near your home?
Jim Sublette, who goes by Subby, told this story at a Severe Weather Seminar last week at the Benson Center about a time he alerted people in St. Clair County that all the conditions were in place to spawn a tornado.
“I saw the hook formation and told them to move immediately to the lowest level of their house,” he said. “Eight minutes later, the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for the county.
“Eight minutes is a lot of time.”
This story illustrated the point he wanted to drive home: the importance of receiving up-to-date severe storm warnings that are specifically for West Central Missouri.
“We’re stuck between the north edge of the National Weather Service for Springfield, and the south edge for Kansas City,” Subby said.
Subby hosted the seminar on March 6 during Weather Preparedness Week. Many of the people in attendance subscribe to Subby’s Weather Talk web site and his Facebook. Several times a week, Subby streams forecasts specifically for countries in West Central Missouri, based on different types of weather radar and models, which he explained at the seminar.
The most interesting visual was a video of the process of a “Tornadogenesis,” which Subby showed with the help of his son Remington. First, a wall cloud forms and rises, then hits warmer air and spreads out to form a flat-topped shape that looks like an anvil. If the underside of the wall cloud is rotating, conditions are ripe for a tornado forming along a flanking line behind the cloud in the rain-free zone.
The spinning cloud may create a twist of clouds in the sky, called a funnel cloud. If the funnel cloud touches the ground, it is called a tornado, Subby said.
Attending the seminar were Levi Schrock and Issac Wilson, who are storm chasers. Schrock is an insurance broker who lives in Nixa, Mo., while his brother Issac lives in Urich and is a paramedic and EMT. With Luke Clampitt of Garden City, they are the “Nader Boys.”
Their most harrowing experience occurred two years ago this May, Levi said, when they were chasing a tornado south of Fort Riley, near Emporia, Kansas.
“We got caught by the tornado after turning down an unpaved maintenance road and getting stuck,” Levi said. “But we weren’t alone. There were 12 of us.”
It was dark by then, Levi said, but they got some good video before that. Storm chasing has become so popular, Subby said, that there have been multi-car wrecks by people trying to follow the storm to get video of tornados to sell to news programs.
Subby explained that four weather conditions are necessary to produce a tornado: moisture, instability, a lifting mechanism and wind shear. When the cold front moved through our area last month, dropping the temperature by 40 degrees in an afternoon, there was not enough moisture, he said, and no instability.
Warm air rising and hitting warmer air creates a cap, he said. In the Midwest, cold fronts serve as a lifting mechanism, he said. Wind shear results from winds meeting from different directions at varying heights.
Subby explained the four types of thunderstorms: single cell, multi-cluster, squall line and super cell. Most of the storms that affect Missouri are squall line, he said, which can extend laterally hundreds of miles. Squall line storms can bring large hail and high winds, and also form tornadoes, indicated by notches in the leading edge of the line. There will also be a hook formation on the radar, indicating rotation, with the squall line bowing out below the notch.
Having a way to receive severe storm warnings at your home or business is crucial, he said. Sirens are only meant to alert people who are outside to move indoors, he said.
“Emergency services no longer sounds “all clear” sirens,” he said, “so if you hear two sirens go off, it’s for two tornado warnings.”
Subby said he has been fascinated by weather since he was a child — his mother still has binders with forecasts he made. He studied meteorology at the University of Missouri for three years, then decided to go into law enforcement, switching to a criminal justice program at UCM. When a professor pointed out he has one class and one lab to finish to get an Earth Science degree, UCM not having a meteorology degree, so he took them and graduated with a double major.
He took his passion for weather forecasting and applied it to helphis local community.
“First responders told me when they were out on an emergency, people always ask them what is happening,” Subby said. “I worked up a grant and got them an app called Radar Scope.”
The first responders said, “Thank you, we got the app, now how do we use it?”. So he gave them a crash course in reading radar maps. The radar most people are familiar with is reflectivity, Subby said, which produces multi-colored bands on weather maps, from yellow to the darker reds and purples, reflecting how much moisture and rainfall is in a system.
Another kind, velocity radar, pinpoints wind speed coming towards and away from the radar source, and is harder to read, as is correlation coefficient radar.
The first responders told people about Subby’s weather skills, they told others, and now he has 7,500 people who subscribe to subbysweathertalk.com and follow his Facebook posts. He is also deputy director of the Henry County Emergency Management office.
The HCEM office has an app called Texcaster, he said, which gives all the emergency alerts, including weather. Another app, Storm Shield, tracks your location, giving you weather alerts where you are traveling, he said.
His Weather Talk, however, is a one-stop shop, Subby said. He analyzes the coming weather using the four different kinds of radar and models that use projected data and real-time data, gathered from weather balloons.
“The first thing I look at every morning is the 500 millibar map and the T-Skew Hodograph,” Subby said.
A hodograph plots winds from atmospheric soundings. Subby also watches the jet stream, which he calls the “steering wind” of storms. A 500 millibar chart displays the amount of humidity in the atmosphere.
Subby asked the storm chaser brothers Levi and Isaac to come to the March 6 seminar so people could see who he was talking about when he posts the Nader Boys’ reports on Weather Talk. Their experiences include catching up with a tornado in Maryville, Levi said, and last year, they chased several twisters in Oklahoma, and also visited a movie filming site of “Twister.”
Oklahoma is part of Tornado Alley, Subby said. West Central Missouri gets only one high-risk tornado warning a year, he said.
Subby said when he visits classrooms for safety talks, he asks students if their family has three things: a smoke detector, a carbon-monoxide detector and a weather radio. All the hands go up for the smoke detector and carbon-monoxide detector, but when he asks how many have weather radios, “I maybe get two hands.”
Subby’s followers on Weather Talk gather weather data and send reports to him, and to the National Weather Service. It’s important to know the categories of hail sizes, he said, which range from pea-sized (a quarter of an inch) to grapefruit.
“It takes a 90 to 100 mile-per-hour wind to uplift and suspend a 2-pound ball of hail,” Subby said.
A severe storm is categorized by hail one-inch in diameter or greater, Subby said, with winds above 58 miles per hour. It may also have tornado indications.
Outreach programs to educate people about severe weather situations, combined with multiple ways for people to receive weather alerts, are key to people surviving a severe storm, he said. Families should plan where to gather when a tornado warning sounds, ideally in the basement, or in a downstairs bathroom or interior room away from windows. The plan should be reviewed and rehearsed every year.
“Every minute counts,” Subby said.
Everyone from Henry County who attended the seminar received a weather radio. Subby also has radios that wake people who are hard of hearing with a flashing light to alert them of pending severe weather. The weather radios are electric, with three AA back-up batteries.
For more information, go to subbysweathertalk.com or Subby’s Weather Talk Facebook.
