No Severe Vermont Storms. Cool Videos From Elsewhere, Though

A non-severe storm over Milton, Vermont last evening

I'm not aware of any of Tuesday's thunderstorms becoming severe in Vermont yesterday, so that was kind of a fortunate bust.

There were locally heavy downpours and some wind gusts, but nothing extreme.

That's not to say there wasn't action elsewhere, though. I've got a couple of videos to show you:

This week, Stormlapse recorded a gorgeous, menacing supercell thunderstorm over the Badlands of South Dakota.

Quite an impressive storm, watch:


I'm not sure when the next video was taken, but it's an illustration of what happens when a thunderstorm rolls into Atlanta's Hartsfield airport, the world's busiest.

You see the planes trying to fly around the storms, go in circles, and just kinda hope this thing passes quick. I'm sure there were quite a few flight delays on this day:

Watch This Plane Get Hit By Lightning In Atlanta

A plane apparently waiting for a storm to clear
at the Atlanta airport was struck by lightning Tuesday.  

Planes in flight get hit by lightning all the time.

Aircraft are designed to take such hits with little or no damage, and passengers inside the planes are pretty much always safe, even if the lightning bolts scare the bejeezus out of them.

The strike here is a bit different.

In Atlanta, Georgia, Tuesday, there was a ground stop at busy Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport as a strong thunderstorm with lots of lightning swept through.

Jack Perkins was aboard one of the planes stacked up on the ground waiting out the bad weather, and he decided to film the long line of airliners waiting to take off.

He captured a dramatic lightning bolt smacking into one of those planes.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution had no word if there was anybody on the plane at the time of the strike.

There's no reports of any injuries among anyone aboard the plane, though I've seen a lot of jokes that the plane had to return to the gate for "bio cleaning" the soiled seats left by passengers who had the wits and other things scared out of them by the lightning.

Here's the video:

Southeastern U.S. Under The Winter Storm Gun Again

Last month, the city of Atlanta had its End of The World moment when a couple inches of snow, combined with a panicked, "We've got to close the schools and get everyone home from work NOW" mentality caused enormous traffic jams that had people trapped on the roads for as long as 20 hours.

The Atlanta GA snow/traffic nightmare in January.
There's another winter storm watch up for
Atlanta. If a storm materializes, we'll see
if they do better this time.  

Well, guess what? There's a winter storm watch up again for Atlanta. This time it's for Monday afternoon into Tuesday.

It's still VERY unclear if the storm will be bad, or just turn out to be mostly rain for Atlanta. It's right on the edge.

But it will be very interesting to see how they handle another winter storm, if it arrives.

We hope practice makes perfect.

This Atlanta storm question is part of another round of snowy, icy weather that will stretch over the next few days from Louisiana to the Carolinas. So we'll hear about problems down that way for a few days.

By the standards of the people of the north, like me here in Vermont, the storm won't be that bad. But despite the frequency of southern storms this winter, the South is still not equipped for, or used to winter storms.

By the way, we here in northern New England won't see much in the way of storminess. We might get a dusting or an inch or two of snow tonight and Monday morning from a weak system passing by.

It'll be cold midweek with subzero lows before it warms up again to near normal February highs in the upper 20s or low 30s by the end of the week.

Some type of storm system might come through New England at the end of the week. It's hard to say how intense it will be, but early indications suggest it will be just light snow in Vermont and surrounding areas on Friday.

Long range forecasts like that are notoriously iffy, so we'll have better forecasts for the Friday system by about midweek.

Huge Atlanta Snow Traffic Mess/Fail Due To Unheeded Warnings

The news that I'm sure you've seen out of Atlanta is epic and horrendous.

Yesterdays snow and traffic disaster in Atlanta.  

When a snowstorm- not a big one, maybe one or two inches, hit during the middle of the day Tuesday, everybody piled into their cars at once and tried to flee for home.

Many people, including some children on school buses, were stranded on the freeways for eight, ten, even 12 hours. 

Some people were still trapped on the freeways early this morning when it was almost time for commuters to start heading into work.

Annoyingly, some victims of the Atlanta snow complained that meteorologists didn't warn them the snow was coming, but the record shows they did, with watches going up more than a day before the storm and more serious warnings many hours before the first flakes fell.

This was not a huge forecasting error, as some in Atlanta area municipal government would have it.     It wasn't. Meteorologists were pretty much right about the timing and intensity of the storm around Atlanta.

The real problem seems to be that government officials, and many citizens of the area, didn't know how to respond to the weather warnings.

The fact that everyone left their schools and offices at about the same time during the day Tuesday  as the snow arrived meant everybody was on the icy roads at once, so nobody went anywhere.

The city and region was ill prepared to treat the roads with salt and sand, and few motorists had much experience, or the necessary snow tires, to navigate the ice.

Given Atlanta's poor performance record of managing snow and ice storms, why didn't they just call off school for the day?

True, it wasn't snowing in the morning, when parents bundled the kids off to school. But the snow was accurately forecast to start by midday, which you'd think somebody would have realized the trip home from school would be problematic.

Even if the snow didn't materialize one snow day on a day in which it didn't snow isn't THAT big a deal.

And what of the major employers in the Atlanta metro region? Haven't they ever heard of telecommuting?  Granted, productivity might have slumped a bit for the day if many employers stayed home, opened up their laptops and tried to get work done in the home office.

But how productive is it to have their workers stranded and freezing on freeways for most of the day?  Instead of sending everyone for the doors when it started snowing at midday, a lot of employers could have told many of their employers to stay home and work Tuesday.

The forecasts were out on Monday. The workers could have taken their material home with them Monday evening.

I also don't think a lot of people understand the system of watches and warnings the National Weather Service puts out when a dangerous storm is approaching.  A watch means to prepare for a likely storm, and a warning means the storm is imminent or already happening.  A lot of people don't make the distinction.

Plus, storm warnings sometimes go up and the storm doesn't prove to be that bad. So people are lulled into thinking the storm won't amound to anything the next time a warning goes up.

This isn't unique to Atlanta. People have died or gotten in danger in storms as diverse as the Joplin, Missouri tornado in 2011 and flooding from Tropical Storm Irene in Vermont, also in 2011.

The National Weather Service and emergency managers are wrestling with language they'd use in different degrees of storm intensity.  But how do you effectively inform the public to take mild precautions for a middling storm, and extreme precautions for an enormous, dangerous storm?

It's a puzzling alchemy, especially since different people respond to different warnings in varying ways. Plus, it's human nature not to respond to a warning unless they actually see the danger with their own eyes. 

People don't take cover from tornadoes until the funnels are right on top of them. People don't get out of the way of flash floods until they see the muddy, debris choked water racing right towards them. And urbanites don't take snowstorms seriously until the flakes are really flying.

So, if you get an unprepared, poorly planned region with little municipal oversight and coordination, and a population not used to emergencies, we'll get a lot more ugly, and maybe deadlier urband and suburan disasters in America in the future.

Here's a video of what happens when people venture out in the South with no snow tires on roads that haven't not been sanded and plowed.




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