Posts Tagged ‘Oklahoma City’
A ONE IN TWENTY-MILLION CHANCE–The True Story of the First Tornado Forecast–Part III
PART III After General Borum’s statement that Captain Miller and Major Fawbush were “about to set a precedent,” Fawbush composed the forecast–what would now be called a tornado warning (albeit one with a long lead-time)–Miller typed it up and handed it off to Base Operations for dissemination. Both men sensed their careers circling the…
Read MoreA ONE IN TWENTY-MILLION CHANCE–The True Story of the First Tornado Forecast–Part II
PART II On the morning of March 25, 1948, based on their hurried research, Captain Miller and Major Fawbush noted a significant similarity between the weather charts for that day and March 20, the date of the Tinker tornado. The two forecasters prepared a hand-drawn prognostic chart (computerized progs were still far in…
Read MoreA ONE IN TWENTY-MILLION CHANCE–The True Story of the First Tornado Forecast–Part I
In the mid-20th century, tornado forecasting was considered to be beyond the “state of the art,” or in other words, impossible. Twisters were deemed acts of God. And any meteorologist attempting to predict what the Almighty had in mind would have been labeled a fool, a charlatan, or a court jester. Maybe worse. Yet two…
Read MoreGABI MEDEIROS, FBI AGENT, AD HOC STORM CHASER (character in Supercell)
Gabi Medeiros is a Special Agent with the FBI. Born of a Russian mother and Portuguese father, she’s attractive but not classically beautiful. As she once explained, “I gotta watch what I eat, or I get a little heavy in the ass and start looking like a female Michelin Man.” Divorced and the veteran of…
Read MoreHUNTING UNICORNS
Yesterday, Silver Lining Tours and I might as well have been hunting unicorns as tornadoes. Tornadoes? We didn’t even see a towering cumulus! For awhile, we thought we might have chance at a big storm far to our west just north of the Kansas border in Nebraska, but, like legislation in the U.S. Congress, it…
Read MoreYELLOW BRICK ROADKILL?
Friday I leave for Oklahoma City where my week-long quest for the wily, or sometimes not so wily, tornado will begin. My wife is absolutely convinced I’m a dead man walking; certain I’ll get swept up like Dorothy and end up as road kill on the Yellow Brick Freeway. More likely, if conditions ripe for…
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