Maryland is no stranger to severe weather, as we have seen tornadoes, damaging winds, flash flooding, and even large hail rips through the state.
The National Weather Service in Sterling, Virginia is tasked with monitoring the weather on all kinds of days, but especially on severe weather days, to issue the appropriate alerts and forecasts.
“So, it’s up to us here 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to keep an eye out for severe weather; both the expected and the ones that unexpectedly pop up. To get as much advance notice as we can whether it’s a tornado or it’s hail or damaging winds, or flooding. We’re trying to get as much advance notice to the people that we can, that’s our goal here”, says Chris Strong, a Warning Coordination Meteorologist for the Sterling office.
The National Weather Service does this through the watches and warning system. Watches are usually given out a few days, or hours for severe weather, in advance and warnings when the threat is more immediate.
“Watches and warnings are the main way we’re getting that advance notice to the people, and it goes out through weather radio, through the internet, over the broadcast television, radio as well. There are also now Wireless Emergency Alerts on people’s phones for the most extreme of our warnings, in particular, tornado warnings. If you’re connected and have a compatible phone, it’ll show up right there just shortly after it’s issued.”
But the process that leads up to issuing those warnings takes shape in a few different ways. From looking at models to checking the radar and even using a special type of balloon.
The weather balloon is built to withstand dramatic pressure changes and is tasked with carrying a very special instrument called a radiosonde. The radiosonde is what records weather information as it travels through the atmosphere.
“So, the instrument is this guy, and we take it out of the box carefully. Carefully not touching the metal arm there 'cause that’s where a lot of our data is stored, our temperatures.”
As the radiosonde travels through the atmosphere, it sends back data to the office and is quality checked in real-time.
“What I want to look for number-wise, just getting down to the nitty-gritty here, I pause it. The data is still coming in but what I want to do is pause it so I can edit the data if I need to. But in this case, looking at the time, so lapse rates are Celsius per kilometer, in the first one thousand meters if it’s any steeper than -34, I can manually edit that data, and smooth it out so to speak. It’ll get rid of that super adiabatic lapse rate.”
Which allows for the data to be properly used and not give off false readings of potential severe weather.
The National Weather Service continuously improves their methods in both publishing the information and alerts and verifying the weather conditions to keep the public safe.
