True but it can still mean rain. Even modest rains over severely flooded regions can exacerbate existing problems.
So, hopefully any precipitation stays well offshore.
But also true in general that a lot of the weather reporting from the major news networks and websites hypes up potential storms based on low probability modeling runs without giving adequate context. It’s disappointing and creates unnecessary Chicken Little issues.
That reminds me about the houses way up on the sides of mountains in the western NC area. I wonder how those places/people are doing?
(An example–zoom in on this and you can find around half a dozen houses.)
ETA: @Great_Antibob two posts up …
Which is why all of us should ignore the MSM on weather, and especially ignore Faux and ignore Weather Channel.
Non-sensationalized information is more available on weather topics than on almost any other area of human interest. And yet people flock to the hype-tastic sources instead. 'Tis a mystery. A vexing mystery.
Yup. So I cannot help but recommend theeyewall.com yet again.
Their motto has been “No Hype” since before the days of the parent SpaceCityWeather site, and they live up to that.
Yay! Our power’s back on! We stopped and thanked the workers in person as well.
thank you!
feel free to provide some links. I ended up watching fox weather this weekend because I was on youtube wanting to watch live (or at least recent) coverage. I found some other options none of which are probably what you are talking about.
and I found tons of videos of not at all current situations (why is searching on youtube so Not User Friendly?)
My housemates wonderful sister came down from Greensboro yesterday with one of her generators and two big cans of gas so we have the fridge going again. And the TV because we were all going stir-crazy listening to the news on I Heart Radio. AND a wifi hotspot so we can call people and connect to our families. Santa Claus is real and she lives in the Piedmont.
Today, improvised post-apocolyptic cuisine. Estimates are that it may be as late as Friday before electricity is restored and I had sausage and hamburger in the freezer that would go bad before then, so I burned some branches and leaves blown down by the storm and cooked the meat in closed cookie tins on the coals. Added cans of beans and diced tomatoes and chili powder. It was a successful experiment. (I didn’t have emergency supplies for a multi-day wide area power outage because I hadn’t had one in around 20 years. Cooking this wasn’t my only option, but I didn’t want to waste the meat.)
Yes, thank you. I signed up for their on-line notices. Hopefully it will have good non-hysterical Great Plains reports.
IMO, as an amateur meteorologist, the best, non-sensationalized information on the actual weather situations comes direct from the sources: the National Weather Service, and the National Hurricane Center.
That said, they don’t generally do videos, which means that they provide their information primarily on their websites, and their social media accounts, but it’s nearly all text and graphics. If you want continuous video coverage, they aren’t going to give you that.
FWIW, when there’s a big weather event happening, like a hurricane, while I may wind up letting The Weather Channel play for hours, I’ll also be sitting here with the NWS and/or NHC sites up. If there’s local severe weather in my area, I’ll be looking at the Facebook feed from my local NWS office, as well as their website, have the TV on to a local station (WGN-TV, which has, IMO, the best weather team in Chicago), and watching the weather radar app on my phone.
I don’t believe they have any currently nor any expected in the near future but rest assured they will provide non-hysterical reports if and when the prospect of a tropical system hitting the Great Plains becomes a likelihood
I was expecting this storm to be overhyped for my area. Six or eight inches of rain is kind of a lot, but it isn’t entirely rare either. I expected it to be more or less the same level of crisis that we get from half an inch of snow. And my area probably wouldn’t have had many problems if it was only the rain and not the wind. But put them together and we had approximately 57 million trees fall over. It is weird seeing so many massive trees probably in the hundred year old range, with limbs spanning in the range of 60 feet having a root system less than 10 feet wide
I have a dearly loved brother who lives in a house on stilts in a swamp on Merritt Island and another treasured, loved person in Miami.
The main problem with over-hyped storms is that when the real thing comes along, folks do not notice the difference. I remember this same scenario with Katrina. People said they had survived this or that storm before and thus didn’t realize Katrina was any different. But the experts at the time knew. And they tried to get the message out.
Local experts here spoke of the seriousness of this situation before the storm and had actual Weather Service warnings that were truly frightening. That’s why I got my wife away. But really most of the rest of the media was focused on Florida and whatever catagory the storm would be, instead of the catastrophic flooding that was inevitably coming to these mountains.
I have had customer after shell-shocked customer at the store telling me that no one thought it would be this bad as they try and find some safe drinking water and something non-perishable to eat. But actually many people did know this was coming and tried to warn everyone. But they got drowned out by the mainstream media phoning-it-in coverage of this hurricane.
There’s also a problem with recency and, very understandably, a lot of people who are anxious and already the sort who want clear, simple “good news vs bad news” reporting. The ones who might want to calmly give good information are punished because people want to listen to sensationalist news. It’s more exciting.
As above, there’s something brewing in the Gulf. At the moment, it’s unlikely to cause a lot of direct wind or storm surge damage but it could still add more rain not far from where they’ve already got too much water. But still a lot of panicky folks who are ready to over-react and also simultaneously starting saying “well, they didn’t warn us last time” or “well, they didn’t get it right and it’s coming right at us”.
Unfortunately, the best we can do for the moment is keep pushing non-hype messages and hope it gets through to more people. And all the while do what we can for the people who have already been affected.
Saw some stuff online today about mule trains being used by volunteers to get supplies into parts of North Carolina that are inaccessible otherwise.
Owner Mike Toberer told the Associated Press that his mules have been delivering food, water, and diapers to the western part of the state’s hard-to-reach mountainous areas. While traditional aid groups are struggling to reach these communities, his team of four-legged athletes is uniquely suited to help.
“We’ll take our chainsaws, and we’ll push those mules through,” he said, noting that each mule can carry about 200 pounds of supplies.
I saw in one source that they’ve also delivered insulin.
The NHC does post videos on Facebook.
IMO one of the big issues with forecasting is that we often only know the things that might happen, not the thing that will happen. When a storm is forming, I spend a lot of time watching things like Mike’s Weather Page, reading Eye of the Storm, and once they starting happening, the official NHC stuff. And I look at models on Tropical Tidbits.
I don’t take any of it as gospel. I do take much of it as possibilities. I’m good at planning for things that might, maybe, probably could happen, and making tradeoffs of what prep to do based on the likely outcomes.
We haven’t found a good way to communicate that range of possibilities to the general public in a way that serves that purpose.
From upthread …
If you’re watching videos, you’re already lost. That format demands hype.
Lost? I’m not talking about weather coming anywhere near me and I’m watching hurricane coverage. it’s a very visual thing so I like to SEE it.
This is what Lake Lure looked like in 1987:
This is what Lake Lure looks like now:
