On this date in 1861...Captain Robert Fitz-Roy initiated a daily weather forecast for the following day for several regions of England. Fitz-Roy used data telegraphed to the Meterological Department in London from 15 stations across the country each morning. The service was well received by the public, but people in scientific circles criticized the effort saying that it lacked scientific merit. Disturbed by the criticism, Fitz-Roy killed himself less than 4 years later.

On this date in 1943...Weather forecasting is critical to many military operations. In 1943, Allied forces were planning a major bombing raid on the oil refineries at Ploesti, Romania. Because the nearest air bases were in North Africa and the distance to the target was at the limit of range for the B-24 aircraft, weather conditions had to be just right. The bombers could encounter no heavy headwinds coming or going and southerly winds would have to be present to spread the fires started by the incendiary bombs. Meteorologists studied 40 years of weather maps to discover that climatological conditions were right only in March and August. Planners chose August and conditions were right on August 1st. The raid was a success.

On this date in 1983...Andrews AFB, Maryland recorded a wind gust to 149 mph in a microburst that occurred just ten minutes after Air Force One had landed with President Reagan aboard. Such microbursts have been the cause of terrible plane crashes.

Big Thompson Canyon is one of the most scenic areas of Colorado. An hour west of Denver, US-34 runs right along the Big Thompson River through much of the 25 mile long canyon.

The weekend of July 31-August 1, 1976 was the Centennial Celebration of Colorad Statehood. Thousands of hikers and campers crowded into the Canyon to enjoy a busy summer weekend of recreation.

On that fateful Saturday afternoon, easterly surface winds were blowing warm, humid air up the Front Range of the Rockies. As the unstable air rose, it condensed into a huge thunderstorm over Estes Park. Winds aloft were very light and the storm remained stationary over the same area for hours.

Beginning at 8:30 p.n. that Saturday evening, as much as 12 inches or rain was dumped directly on the canyon by the thunderstorm. Eight inches fell in just two hours at Glen Haven and Glen Comfort. The rock walls of the steep canyon did not soak up any of the rainfall and the river quickly rose. A 20 foot wall of water poured down the canyon, taking everything in its path, including unwitting campers and residents.

139 people were killed in the flood and the bodies of 6 people have never been found.

Before the flood event, the streamflow on the river was a meager 127 cubic feet per second. At the peak of the flood, it was an unthinkable 31,200 cubic fet per second.

It took over a year to rebuild Highway 34 in the bottom of the canyon. Damage totalled over $35 million.

Visitors to Front Range canyons now find signs warning them to climb to safety in case of flash floods.

As the United States ended the main part of its 2002 tornado season, it had been the slowest season since 1988. Less than half of the average tornadoes had been reported by July 24th.

The end of July marks the end of the main part of tornado season, but tornadoes have been reported in every month of the year. Killer tornadoes had also been in short supply, with only 11 fatalities reported as of July 24th. Typically, 47 people would have lost their lives in tornadoes by the end of July. The average number of fatalities in a given year in the United States is 57.

Improved warning systems save lives, but the 2002 numbers were quite remarkable. The early part of the tornado season featured a marked absence in killer tornadoes. Indeed, the first reported tornado fatality occurred on April 21st, the latest in recorded history.

Meteorologists at the Storm Prediction Center blamed the low numbers of tornadoes on the persistent drought that had gripped most of the country. In addition, a late winter cold spell across the early season tornado breeding grounds of the Deep South contributed to the slow start.

How did the year end? Well, in terms of the number of tornadoes, the 941 tornadoes that occurred in the year was well less than the twenty year average of 1137. The good luck in term of fatalities continued into November with only 15 through October. But then on November 5th, two people were killed in an Election Day tornado in Southeast Alabama and then 36 people died in the Veteran’s Day Tornado Outbreak on November 10th, including 12 in Alabama.

At 4:05 p.m. on July 10, 1991, L’Express flight 508 took off from New Orleans International Airport bound for Mobile. The eventual destination of the Beech C99 aircraft was Birmingham. It left Mobile at 5:05 p.m. with thirteen passengers, the Captain and First Officer. The Terminal Forecast for Birmingham indicated the possibility of thunderstorms, but the flight was uneventful. At 5:45 p.m., as the crew began its approach into the Birmingham area, the weather officer contacted the controllers at the airport and informed them that Level 3 and 4 thunderstorms extended from near the Vulcan VOR, a navigational aid west northwest of Birmingham to near Gadsden. The activity was pushing southeast. At 5:51 p.m., the pilot asked the controllers at Atlanta Center for permission to deviate around a thunderstorm buildup that was in their path.

At 5:55 p.m., a strong thunderstorm moved across the field at the Birmingham Airport. The tower made an announcement to all flights that a low level wind shear advisory was in effect. A Lear Jet on approach decided to cancel its approach and wait. At 6:00 p.m., the Atlanta Center handed off L’Express 508 to Birmingham approach control. The south radar controller acknowledged the plane and gave it permission to descend. At that time, a Piper Aerostar was on final approach to runway 5, using an instrument approach. At 6:01, the Lear asked controllers how the Piper’s inbound ride was going. The Aero reported no problems.

At 6:03, the BHM controller advised LEX 508 that the Lear had cancelled its approach. The Captain told the First Officer to advise the passengers that their landing might be delayed. At 6:05 p.m., the pilots of the Piper Aero reported that the ride had not been that bad during their landing. One minute later, the crew of LES 508 decided they would attempt the landing based on the report from the Piper. At 6:08, LEX 508 was advised to stay on the approach frequency in case they decided to abort. After replying “okay,” the Captain told the First Officer, who was handling the plane, to watch out for wind shear.

As passengers looked through the open cockpit door, through the windshield they could see the inky black sky of a thunderstorm directly in their path. They wondered aloud to each other if the crew was going to fly through the storm or go around it. In the cockpit, the Captain had given control of the aircraft momentarily to the First Officer so that he could consult a chart.

At 6:09, the transcript of the cockpit voice recorder tape indicated that the Captain told the First Officer that if he didn’t feel comfortable flying the plane during the landing to let him know. He also told him to look out for wind shear. Soon, the sound of very heavy rain can be heard hitting the windshield. Shortly thereafter, the BHM controller asked LEX 508 how the ride was. “Okay, so far,” was the response. Just before 6:11, Birmingham Approach told LEX 508 to contact the tower for landing. It would be the last radio transmission from the doomed flight.

On the ground in Ensley, several witnesses saw the plane as it flew over. They reported that very heavy rain, frequent lightning and winds strong enough to bed trees over to the grounds were occurring. One witness reported that the plane appeared to be struck by lightning. Several witnesses gave erratic reports about engine sounds. Seconds later, the Captain called for climb power. On the tape, the sound of the engines increasing can be heard. Suddenly, the plane lifted up and to the right. The Captain exclaimed, “What are you doing?” Then he realized that the upset was not due to anything the First Officer was doing. The plane then banked severely to the left, with the wings becoming nearly vertical.

On the morning of July 11, 1991, members of the National Transportation Safety Board were in Birmingham to investigate the crash of L’Express flight 508. The Beech C99 commuter aircraft had gone down on approach to Birmingham during a thunderstorm at approximately 6:12 p.m. CDT. The Captain and one passenger were the only survivors. The First Officer and twelve other passengers were killed in the crash. The investigators combined information from the cockpit voice recorder, interviews with the survivors and controllers and weather records.

The safety board expressed concerns about the Captain’s fatigue level, since he was flying the third of four flight legs scheduled for him that day. The fact that he had been on duty nearly fourteen hours led to concerns that he might have chosen to fly through the storm because he had been on duty so long. The investigators found that weather information was accurate and that the crew was properly informed about the storm. The fact that another plane had just landed through the storm concerned the investigators, because a similar sudden and violent unexpected motion like LEX508 experienced could have just as easily have happened to the first plane.

In the end, the NTSB decided that the probable cause of the L’Express crash was the decision of the Captain to initiate and continue an instrument approach into clearly identified thunderstorm activity, resulting in a loss of control of the aircraft from which the crew was unable to recover and subsequent collision with obstacles and terrain.

Thankfully, we have made tremendous progress in dealing with wind shear in aviation. I will keep that is mond as I board my flight to Tampa later Monday morning...

On July 5, 1916, a hurricane moved inland on the Mississippi Coast. Winds over 100 mph were measured at Mobile, along with a barometric pressure of 28.92 inches. The 106 mph wind at Pensacola is the highest ever recorded in the Port City. Severe flooding was reported in the city of Mobile as the tide reached a height of over eleven feet.

In nearby Pensacola, the wind was measured at 104 mph. A total of 34 people died in the hurricane. Damages totaled $3 million.

For the next five days, the weakening system meandered around the Deep South. Heavy rains sent rivers and streams over their banks and caused tremendous amounts of agricultural damage.

On the morning of July 8th, the remnants of the hurricane were located very near the Magic City of Birmingham. The city received 8.84 inches of rain in twenty four hours, which is still the all-time record.

Another hurricane would make landfall near Pensacola later in the month and dump more heavy rain on Birmingham, where the monthly rainfall total reached 20.16 inches, a monthly record that still stands.

We could use a little of that rain now...

On this date in 1994, Tropical Storm Alberto made landfall near Destin, Florida with top winds of 65 mph and a central pressure of 995 mb. Nothing to write home about. Damage along the coast was negligible. But Alberto was a serious reminder that tropical storms can be quite devastating, especially as it comes to inland flooding.

After landfall, the motion of the storm slowed and precipitation increased. The storm moved slowly through Alabama into Georgia, stalling just south of Atlanta. Over the next few days it reversed its course and then looped back on its previous course before ultimately dissipating.

During that period it dumped copious amounts of rain across the area. Amounts as high as 21.1 inches in 24 hours were observed at Americus, Georgia. and Macon was deluged with over ten inches. This rainfall produced record and near-record flooding along the Flint, Ocmulgee, Chattahoochee,Choctawhatchee, and Apalachicola Rivers.

Overall, flash flooding and flooding caused by the rainfall from Alberto took thirty three lives, destroyed thousands of homes (including some entire communities), forced approximately 50,000 people to be evacuated, and caused property damage (including lost crops) estimated as high as $750 million.

It would be the worst natural disaster in the history of the state of Georgia. Thirty counties were declared disaster areas.

It was back on this date in 1982 that Larry Walters, a Los Angeles man, decided to attempt flight in a lawn chair attached to forty five Army surplus weather balloons. Walters filled the balloons with helium. Armed with sandwiches, soft drinks, a camera and an air gun for shooting the balloons to regulate his altitude, Walters took off from his backyard, intent on allowing the prevailing winds to carry him over the mountains to the Mojave Desert.

But Walters drifted into the airspace of Los Angeles International Airport. A TWA airliner gave controllers a visual report that must have sounded like the pilots were on drugs, something like, “LAX, we are level at 16,000 feet. We have a man flying in a lawn chair with balloons at ten o’clock.”

Walters used the pellet gun to lower himself back to earth, where police were waiting for him. He was charged by the FAA with violations relating to the airworthiness of his craft and for not being in contact with air controllers. His $4,000 fine was eventually reduced to $1,500.

Walters appeared on national talk shows, including David Letterman. Lawn chair Larry, as he was dubbed, was never able to make much money from his fifteen minutes of fame, and sadly, he committed suicide on October 6, 1993.

Just after seven in the morning on June 30, 1908, a huge fireball streaked across the sky during the daylight hours over Siberia. A huge explosion occurred in the air near the Stony Tunguska River.

A shock wave radiated out from the site for hundreds of miles, breaking windows and creating deafening thunderclaps. Seismographs in Russia picked the event up as if it were an earthquake. Sensitive devices around the world in Washington even picked up the shock. The explosion flattened trees for 40 miles around and killed wildlife, but no crater or meteorite fragments were ever found. The effect looked like those left by the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Trees near the epicenter of the blast were not blown down, but were left standing, stripped of all their branches. There was even a huge mushroom clouds and black rain after the explosion.

Was it an atomic bomb? Was it an alien spaceship crash? Many fantastic explanations were offered, such as a piece of anti-matter or a small black hole striking the earth. Computer simulations done by scientists today now indicate that the explosion was probably caused by a stony meteorite entering the earth’s atmosphere and breaking up in a firey explosion just before hitting the earth, hence no fragments. Scientists today know that there are hundreds of pieces of space debris that could strike the earth producing another event like the Tunguska explosion.

On March 28, 1963, Mr. Whitney Bartie filed suit in United States District Court, Western District Louisiana the Lake Charles Division against the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act for the death of his wife and children in Hurricane Audrey. His case was based on the assertion that the U.S. Weather Bureau was negligent in warning the public about the deadly hurricane, than killed 390 people in Cameron Parish in Louisiana.

The plaintiff's attorneys claimed that the Weather Bureau was negligent in failing to five adequate warning concerning the nature, intensity, location, path, velocity, speed and storm surge as well as the time it would strike the Louisiana coast.

Bartie and his family went to bed on the night of June 26, 1957. They believed that they could get up the following morning and evacuate before the hurricane arrived. Broadcasts from Lake Charles were geared for residents a little further inland and statements such as “there is no need for alarm tonight and you can rest well tonight,” did not apply to coastal residents who could nonetheless hear the broadcasts.

The Bartie family awakened early on the 27th to flood water already lapping under their home. Their story was played out dozens if not hundreds of times in the low lying area. As the storm surge inundated their home, they were forced to the roof where one by one, Bartie’s family was ripped from his clutches and drowned. Bartie finally found refuge in a tree as was there for nearly 12 hours.

Negligence by the defendant was not established. No expert would testify that the Weather Bureau had been negligent. Dr. Noel Edwin LaSeur gave the most significant testimony, declaring that the failure to forecast the acceleration and intensification nof the hurricane in the hours before landfall was simply due to the state of the art in weather forecasting at the time. ?

The Court held that the evidence failed to establish the requisite negligence on the part of the Weather Bureau and ruled for the defendant.

On the evening of Juen 26, 1957, Hurricane Audrey was roaring ashore as a much stronger hurricane than forecasters had expected...the results were disastrous...

NEW ORLEANS WEATHER BUREAU
HURRICANE WARNING AND ADVISORY NUMBER 7 AUDREY
10 PM CST JUNE 26 1957

CHANGE TO HURRICANE WARNINGS 10 PM CST O UPPER TEXAS COAST AS FAR SOUTH AS HIGH ISLAND. LOWER STORM WARNINGS EAST OF LOUISIANA TO PENSACOLA>

AT 10 PM CST...0400Z...HURRICANE AUDREY WAS CENTERED ABOUT 235 MILES SOUTH OF LAKE CHARLES LOUISIANA NEAR LATITUDE 27.0 LONGITUDE 93.5 MOVING NORTHWARD ABOUT 10 MPH. THIS MOVEMENT IS EXPECTED TO CONTINUE AND THE AREA FROM HIGH ISLAND TO MORGAN CITY IS EXPECTED TO BEAR THE BRUNT OF THIS HURRICANE THURSDAY.

HIGHEST WINDS ARE ESTIMATED 100 MPH NEAR CENTER AND GALES EXTEND OUT 150 TO 200 MILES TO EAST AND NORTH OF CENTER AND 50 MILES TO THE SOUTHWEST.

TIDES ARE EXPECTED TO REACH 5 TO 9 FFET FROM HIGH ISLAND TEXAS TO MORGAN CITY LOUISIANA AND 3 TO 6 FEET ELSEWHERE FROM FREEPORT TEXAS TO BILOXI MISSISSIPPI BY LATE THURSDAY. ALL PERSONS IN LOW EXPOSED PLACES SHOULD MOVE TO HIGHER GROUND. WINDS ARE INCREASING ALONG THE UPPER TEXAS AND LOUISIANA COASTS AND WILL REACH GALE FORCE TONIGHT AND EARLY THURSDAY.

HURRICANE WARNINGS ARE DISPLAYED ALONG THE ENTIRE LOUISIANA COAST AND ON THE UPPER TEXAS COAST AS FAR SOUTH AS HIGH ISLAND AND STORM WARNINGS AT GALVESTON. THE THREAT OF HURRICANE FORCE WINDS OVER SOUTHEAST LOUISIANA HAS LESSENED CONSIDERABLY.

NEXT ADVISORY AT 4 AM CST BULLETIN AT 1 AM CST.

CONNER WEATHER BUREAU NEW ORLEANS


On the evening of Wednesday, June 26, 1957, residents of Cameron Parish in far southwestern Louisiana listened with concern to the 10 p.m. newscasts out of Port Arthur. The 10 p.m. advisory stated that the center of Hurricane Audrey was 235 miles south of Lake Charles, Louisiana with top winds of 100 mph. The advisory warned that gales extended out 200 miles to the north of the center and that tides of 5 to 9 feet above normal would affect the coast. Although the advisory urged people in low exposed places to move to higher ground, the problem was in the wording. The advisory stated that the tides would occur by “late Thursday.”

Reconnaissance during the morning of the 26th indicated that Audrey had a central pressure of 973 millibars and top winds of 100 mph. No other eye penetration was done during the afternoon or night. A radar tracking flight did indicate that the rain pattern with the hurricane had become more intense during the nighttime hours. So the hurricane forecaster did not have complete information when he put the advisory to bed before the late night news shows. Audrey was intensifying rapidly and moving faster toward the coast.

Most residents in low lying Cameron Parish heard the 4 p.m. advisory say that the hurricane was forecast to move inland late on Thursday and decided to leave early Thursday morning. Residents recalled that the news broadcasts out of Port Arthur had downplayed the situation. And the situation in Port Arthur was not as serious, but in Cameron, forty miles closer to the ocean, the situation was becoming more serious by the minute.

During the final hours between the final reconnaissance observation and landfall, Hurricane Audrey underwent explosive deepening. The actual pressure at landfall is not known for sure as no direct readings were made. Researchers extrapolated from the closest official reading at the Calcasieu Coast Guard Station 20 miles east of the landfall point just west of Cameron that the pressure at landfall may have been as low as 930 to 936 millibars! Top winds were 150 mph, making Audrey a Category Four and nearly Category Five storm, quite a different story from the Category Two hurricane that Cameron residents thought they were dealing with late that night.

Residents who stayed up that night realized that tides were rising by 2:30 a.m. and by 4:30 a.m., escape was impossible as roads were underwater. Residents who went to bed in places like Cameron awoke to water in their houses. It would begin a morning of fighting for survival for thousands of people in Cameron Parish, trying to keep from drowning or being killed by flying debris while fighting poisonous snakes and crazed animals. 390 people perished and another 190 were never heard from or found again.