New post, who dis?

A frequent topic

As we briefly covered in the last issue, there was a lot going on in Oklahoma. Naturally, there were warnings, TV coverage, radio coverage etc., but some people were still unprepared (link to the tweet if you want it).

This event highlighted (again) the difficulty of communicating weather hazards. There’s of course the push side (my unofficial term), where you have the NWS, TV meteorologists, radio meteorologists, etc. informing the public of the hazards. This is often called messaging.

The other part of this is the receiving side (again, my term). It’s how people consume and process the messaging. People assess risk differently, which makes messaging difficult. For example, some people might hear “tornado watch” and ignore it, and some people might get under cover immediately. This is pretty simplified but you get the idea.

The WeatherBrains podcast covered this (again) on Monday. They start talking about it around the 1:06 mark, and do a much better (and more detailed) job of explaining the challenges.

Some additional coverage on the Oklahoma event if you’re interested: WaPo article, graphic that shows the dip and then rise of pressure as the tornado in Norman, OK went through).

This is also a good time to remind you to get a weather radio. We spoke about those before!

One of the reasons I do this newsletter

Weather impacts us all. We often think a storm is done after it passes us by, but that’s not really true.

On a lighter note

It’s true fam, yum.

It sort of snowed a lot again

So we’re talking about it again. It’s honestly been hard keeping up on the totals, both when and where the came in. Below are a few updates, but even these might be outdated already.

Here’s a look at the current year compared to 1982-1983. Or in the SF Chronicle if you prefer.

Here’s another look, but split across the northern, central, and southern Sierras.

And a third look, but at the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab. That’s like, a lot of snow.

But, it looks like we’re starting to catch a break.

Latest offices hours with Daniel Swain

You can find them over on YouTube. He went into some more detail on the recent low-level snow among other things.

How the pattern of trends across the tropical Pacific Ocean is critical for understanding the future climate

Yes, that’s a long title but it’s a pretty cool article. There’s an intro section and then the rest of it follows a Q&A format.

Some other weather podcasts if you’re interested

I mentioned WeatherBrains earlier but there are more!

Happy meteorological spring!

That’s right, it’s today. See you next time.

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