Storm Chasing Research Articles

Efficacy, Safety, and Pharmacokinetics of AZD7442 (Tixagevimab/Cilgavimab) for Prevention of Symptomatic COVID-19: 15-Month Final Analysis of the PROVENT and STORM CHASER Trials.

The phase3 PROVENT and STORM CHASER studies evaluated AZD7442 (tixagevimab/cilgavimab) for pre-exposure and post-exposure prophylaxis of symptomatic coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). We report the final 15-month results of both studies. In PROVENT, participants were randomized 2:1 to receive 300mg AZD7442 (n = 3460) or placebo (n = 1737). In STORM CHASER, participants were enrolled within 8days of exposure to a severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus2 (SARS-CoV-2)-infected individual and randomized 2:1 to receive 300mg AZD7442 (n = 749) or placebo (n = 372). In PROVENT, the relative risk reduction (RRR) in symptomatic COVID-19 for AZD7442 versus placebo was 76.7% at primary analysis [95% confidence interval (CI) 46.1, 90.0; p < 0.001], 83.0% at day183 (95%CI 67.3, 91.2; nominal p < 0.001), and 46.3% at day366 (95%CI 23.1, 62.4; nominal p < 0.001). Severe/critical COVID-19 was reduced by 91.4% with AZD7442 versus placebo by day366 (95%CI 61.3, 98.1; nominal p < 0.0001). Adverse events (AEs) occurred in 58.2% and 58.0% of participants administered AZD7442 or placebo, respectively; serious AEs (SAEs) occurred in 6.2% and 5.6%, respectively. In STORM CHASER, the RRR in symptomatic COVID-19 for AZD7442 versus placebo was 33.3% at primary analysis (95%CI - 25.9, 64.7; p = 0.212), 43.3% at day183 (95%CI 1.4, 67.4; nominal p = 0.044) and 3.4% at day366 (95%CI - 35.6, 31.2; nominal p = 0.842). Severe/critical COVID-19 did not occur in participants receiving AZD7442 versus 0.5% of participants receiving placebo by day366. AEs occurred in 46.5% and 51.9% of participants administered AZD7442 or placebo, respectively; SAEs occurred in 2.7% and 4.3%, respectively. In both studies, serum concentration-time profiles over 457days were similar for tixagevimab and cilgavimab and consistent with the extended half-life reported for AZD7442 (approximately 90days). This analysis provides proof of concept supporting long-term safety of intramuscularly administered AZD7442 for prevention of symptomatic/severe COVID-19. A graphical abstract is available with this article. PROVENT (NCT04625725) and STORM CHASER (NCT04625972).

Pull and Push Drivers of Giant-Wave Spectators in Nazaré, Portugal: A Cultural Ecosystem Services Assessment Based on Geo-Tagged Photos

This paper maps the cultural ecosystem services (CES) of a well-known giant-wave hotspot located in Nazaré, Portugal. The paper adopts a qualitative approach combining an auto-ethnographic direct observation of a journey and the content analysis of photos and videos posted on the YouTube and Facebook pages of tourists and operators. A total of 44 geotagged photos from a sample of 6914 photos retrieved from Flickr allowed the classification and spatial distribution of several CES: (1) recreational—surf activities; (2) aesthetic—photography; (3) spiritual—dark tourism and risk recreation; (4) intangible heritage—maritime knowledge; (5) scientific—wave height forecast; (6) sense of place; and (7) social relations. The paper also proposes a theoretical framework that highlights the pull drivers (risk recreation, storm chasing, or spectacular death voyeurism) and the push drivers (e.g., marketing campaigns and wave forecasts alerts) that explain the behaviors of the big-wave spectators/chasers during the experience journey. Public decision-makers, destination marketing organizations, tourism operators, and business entrepreneurs must acknowledge the relevance of journey mapping in order to identify the moments of stress and the touchpoints associated with peak/positive experiences generated by these CES. This study confirms some push and pull factors assessed by previous studies.

Storm Chasers: Seabird species finds safety deep within a hurricane.

Storm Chasers: Seabird species finds safety deep within a hurricane.

New Crowdsourced Science Project Will Study Sprites

The NASA-funded project is asking sky gazers, storm chasers, and scientists to capture photos of sprites and other optical phenomena that flash above thunderclouds after a lightning strike.

Storm chasing: Tracking Holocene storminess in southern Sweden using mineral proxies from inland and coastal peat bogs

Severe extratropical winter storms are a recurrent feature of the European climate and cause widespread socioeconomic losses. Due to insufficient long-term data, it remains unclear whether storminess has shown a notable response to changes in external forcing over the past millennia, which impacts our ability to project future storminess in a changing climate. Reconstructing past storm variability is essential to improving our understanding of storms on these longer, missing timescales. Peat sequences from coastal ombrotrophic bogs are increasingly used for this purpose, where greater quantities of coarser grained beach sand are deposited by strong winds during storm events. Moving inland however, storm intensity decreases, as does sand availability, muting potential paleostorm signals in bogs. We circumvent these issues by taking the innovative approach of using mid-infrared (MIR) spectral data, supported by elemental information, from the inorganic fraction of Store Mosse Dune South (SMDS), a 5000-year-old sequence from a large peatland located in southern Sweden. We infer past changes in mineral composition and thereby, the grain size of the deposited material. The record is dominated by quartz, whose coarse nature was confirmed through analyses of potential local source sediments. This was supported by further mineralogical and elemental proxies of atmospheric input. Comparison of SMDS with within-bog and regionally relevant records showed that there is a difference in proxy and site response to what should be similar timing in shifts in storminess over the ∼100 km transect considered. We suggest the construction of regional storm stacks, built here by applying changepoint modelling to four transect sites jointly. This modelling approach has the effect of reinforcing signals in common while reducing the influence of random noise. The resulting Southern Sweden-Storm Stack dates stormier periods to 4495–4290, 3880–3790, 2885–2855, 2300–2005, 1175–1065 and 715-425 cal yr BP. By comparing with a newly constructed Western Scotland-Storm Stack and proximal dune records, we argue that regional storm stacks allow us to better compare past storminess over wider areas, gauge storm track movements and by extension, increase our understanding of the drivers of storminess on centennial to millennial timescales.

Cover Photograph

Front cover: Supercell thunderstorm with wall and inflow clouds (Cumulonimbus murus cauda): ‘The Leoti supercell is well known amongst storm chasers for its photogenic qualities and is one of the most beautiful storms I've ever seen. The storm was incredibly slow moving and several tornadoes were reported, but they were all fairly brief.’ Taken near Leoti, Kansas, USA on 21 May 2016 (© Cammie Czuchnicki.)image

Swabian MOSES 2021: An interdisciplinary field campaign for investigating convective storms and their event chains

The Neckar Valley and the Swabian Jura in southwest Germany comprise a hotspot for severe convective storms, causing tens of millions of euros in damage each year. Possible reasons for the high frequency of thunderstorms and the associated event chain across compartments were investigated in detail during the hydro-meteorological field campaign Swabian MOSES carried out between May and September 2021. Researchers from various disciplines established more than 25 temporary ground-based stations equipped with state-of-the-art in situ and remote sensing observation systems, such as lidars, dual-polarization X- and C-band Doppler weather radars, radiosondes including stratospheric balloons, an aerosol cloud chamber, masts to measure vertical fluxes, autosamplers for water probes in rivers, and networks of disdrometers, soil moisture, and hail sensors. These fixed-site observations were supplemented by mobile observation systems, such as a research aircraft with scanning Doppler lidar, a cosmic ray neutron sensing rover, and a storm chasing team launching swarmsondes in the vicinity of hailstorms. Seven Intensive Observation Periods (IOPs) were conducted on a total of 21 operating days. An exceptionally high number of convective events, including both unorganized and organized thunderstorms such as multicells or supercells, occurred during the study period. This paper gives an overview of the Swabian MOSES (Modular Observation Solutions for Earth Systems) field campaign, briefly describes the observation strategy, and presents observational highlights for two IOPs.

Infrasound measurement system for real-time in situ tornado measurements

Abstract. Previous work suggests that acoustic waves at frequencies below human hearing (infrasound) are produced during tornadogenesis and continue through the life of a tornado, which have potential to locate and profile tornadic events and provide a range of improvements relative to current radar capabilities, which are the current primary measurement tool. Confirming and identifying the fluid mechanism responsible for infrasonic production has been impeded by limited availability and quality (propagation-related uncertainty) of tornadic infrasound data. This paper describes an effort to increase the number of measurements and reduce the uncertainty in subsequent analysis by equipping storm chasers and first responders in regular proximity to tornadoes with mobile infrasound measurement capabilities. The study focus is the design, calibration, deployment, and analysis of data collected by a Ground-based Local INfrasound Data Acquisition (GLINDA) system that collects and relays data from an infrasound microphone, GPS receiver, and an inertial measurement unit (IMU). GLINDA has been deployed with storm chasers beginning in May 2020 and has provided continuing real-time automated monitoring of spectrum and peak detection. In analysis of sampled severe weather phenomena, the signal measured from an EFU (EF-Unknown, where EF represents the Enhanced Fujita scale) tornado (Lakin, KS, USA) shows an elevated broadband signal between 10 and 15 Hz. A significant hail event produced no significant increase in infrasound signal despite rotation in the storm. The consistency of these observations with existing fixed-array measurements and real-time tools to reduce measurement uncertainty demonstrates the value of acquiring tornado infrasound observations from mobile on-location systems and introduces a capability for real-time processing and display of mobile infrasonic measurements.

The Characteristics of United States Hail Reports: 1955-2014

The United States hail observation dataset maintained and updated annually by the Storm Prediction Center is one of the largest currently available worldwide and spans the period 1955-present. Despite its length, climatology of this dataset is nontrivial because of numerous characteristics that are nonmeteorological in origin. Here, the main features and limitations of the dataset are explored, including the implications of an increasing frequency in the time series, approaches to spatial smoothing of observations, and the sources that contribute to the hail dataset. Despite these problems, using limited temporal windows, spatial binning and judicious application of smoothing techniques reveals important characteristics of the hail dataset. The annual and diurnal cycles are found to be sensitive to the spatial shift northwards of observations and increasing report frequency in the Southeast. Hail days, in contrast to hail reports, show no national trend over the last 25 y. Regional and local influences on hail reporting are identified stemming from verification procedures and contributions from local officials. The change in the definition of severe hail size from 0.75 in (1.9 cm) to 1.00 in (2.5 cm) in 2010 has a particularly clear signature in the report statistics. The contribution of storm chasers and source of report factors beyond population to the hail dataset is also explored, and the difficulty in removing these changes discussed. The overall findings highlight the limitations and nonmeteorological features present in hail observations. Adding visual and descriptive metadata has the potential to improve the hail reporting process.

A Storm Chasing Conjecture? An Afterthought on Germ. fr. 4.30 Gain

A Storm Chasing Conjecture? An Afterthought on Germ. fr. 4.30 Gain

Infrasound measurements of tornadoes and other severe storm events at close range

Recent experimental evidence suggests that, during tornadogenesis and through the life a tornado, acoustic waves at frequencies below human hearing (infrasound) are produced. To date, acoustic data required to identify the fluid mechanism responsible for this infrasound has been limited—often gathered by large fixed installations. The design and deployment of a mobile Ground-based Local Infrasound Data Acquisition (GLINDA) system was completed at Oklahoma State University to expand the number of samples and enable close-range measurements which would mitigate the measurement uncertainty associated with long distance atmospheric propagation. GLINDA has been deployed alongside Oklahoma-based media storm chasers since May 2020 and has already returned data over multiple severe weather events, including tornadic measurements acquired with GLINDA on 22 May 2020 in Lakin, Kansas. The GLINDA-equipped storm chaser vehicle can additionally provide acoustic data on other weather events such as wildfires and winter weather storms as the vehicle is appropriate for sustained, close observation of these environments. This presentation will cover system design, measurement capabilities, and acoustic production by select weather phenomenon.

Editorial Note-From JCWF Desk

As quoted in the above text that environment is where we all meet and it is the one thing that we mutually share. Similarly Journal of Climatology and Weather Forecasting which is an open access peer reviewed journal is a mutual platform for all the climatologists, meteorologists and weather forecasters that provide great opportunity to share the knowledge from the journal’s desk. And also the journal is attracting millions of readers around the globe by sharing the newest updates/researches/opinions from the eminent authors and editors from different continental zones, who are contributing in the journal. This is exultant to mention that not only the high profile researchers and scholars are in the contributors list of the journal but the editorial panel is also promoting the students/young researchers to share their knowledge and promulgating their opinions. This is prideful to announce that with the support of the prestigious editors of the journal, we are successfully releasing the third issue of the volume 8, very soon after the second issue released in July. For creative sharing of knowledge in the field of climate, weather forecasting, meteorology, global warming, synoptic meteorology, numerical forecasting, the journal is also emphasizing on additional article types that includes video abstracts, research posters, monographs, bibliography, corrigendum, editorial notes, interactive keys, letter to editor, short communication, etc. Because of this admirable step we are receiving good number of articles and JCWF platform is able to captivate the audience globally. The main objective of the journal is to convey the update to date information to the readers and the growth of individual author is also considered that is helpful for them in upgrading their profiles. Another step taken by the journal is that we are embracing the advertisers/manufacturers to use JCWF platform for promoting their products. As we have thousands of graduate and post graduate students connected with us as readers therefore we also welcome institutes and universities to share the admission brochures on the journal website. This will give mutual benefits to the students as well as universities. Journal of Climatology and Weather Forecasting have 13 editors in the editorial panel from different continents, 50+ reviewers that are currently supporting the journal with enthusiasm. We are grateful to all of them for granting their valuable time to the journal. We are also thankful to the supporting members including graphics team, finance person, web team, coordinators, QC-team for their appreciable work. Because of the significant efforts of the team, we are able to maintain the quality of the journal and successfully releasing the issue within time. For further growth of the journal are anticipating kind cooperation from the authors and readers. We support the authors in every possible way and focus on their individual growth that will in return help then to gain and enjoy the honor from the global audience. For the next upcoming issue we are honoured to invite the climatologists, forecasters, storm chasers to come up with their valuable researches/opinions/reviews and enlight the audience with your knowledge.

From Clear Skies to EF5s: How Storm Chasing Teams Stay Engaged with Temporally Uncertain Work

How do people in teams engage with temporally uncertain activities, where the work bounces from slow and uneventful to exciting and chaotic, often unpredictably? Existing management theory focuses on temporal uncertainty as a coordination or strategic problem. This view, however, misses the extent to which people respond emotionally to the temporal dimensions of work. Its timing, pace and rhythm can foster role engagement among organizational participants, or disappoint and disengage them. Based on an ethnographic study of storm chasers in Tornado Alley, we propose that teams coordinate their sense of time in part to maintain collective role engagement with temporally uncertain work. Theorizing temporal organizing as a process of group emotion work, we explain our seemingly counterintuitive observations, like storm chasing teams creating ambiguous, open-ended or less plausible expectations about the future. We show how these findings contribute to the literatures on temporality and collective role engagement, and draw practical implications for teams doing temporally uncertain work.

Students of Purdue Observing Tornadic Thunderstorms for Research (SPOTTR) A Severe Storms Field Work Course at Purdue University

AbstractA summer course has been developed at Purdue University that leverages students’ intrinsic desire to observe tornadoes as a motivator for learning severe storms forecasting. Relative to previous “storm chasing” courses described in the literature, the Students of Purdue Observing Tornadic Thunderstorms for Research (SPOTTR) course is enhanced by active learning exercises, career exploration activities, and the inclusion of research-grade meteorological instrumentation in order to provide an authentic in-field experiential learning scenario. After teaching severe weather forecasting skills and deployment techniques for several meteorological instruments (such as a mobile radar, radiosondes, and disdrometers), the instructors then guide the students on a 1-week field trip to the Great Plains, where the group executes a miniature field campaign to collect high-quality meteorological observations in and near severe storms. On days with no targetable severe weather, the participants visit sites deemed beneficial to the students’ professional development. The final week of the course is spent performing retrospective case studies based on the observations collected, and distilling lessons learned. Surveys given to SPOTTR students show that students’ understanding of severe storms forecasting, technical skills, and career aspirations all improved as a result of having participated in the SPOTTR course, affirming the efficacy of the course design.

Reliability and Climatological Impacts of Convective Wind Estimations

AbstractConvective surface winds in the contiguous United States are classified as severe at 50 kt (58 mi h−1, or 26 m s−1), whether measured or estimated. In 2006, NCDC (now NCEI) Storm Data, from which analyzed data are directly derived, began explicit categorization of such reports as measured gusts (MGs) or estimated gusts (EGs). Because of the documented tendency of human observers to overestimate winds, the quality and reliability of EGs (especially in comparison with MGs) has been challenged, mostly for nonconvective winds and controlled-testing situations, but only speculatively for bulk convective data. For the 10-yr period of 2006–15, 150 423 filtered convective-wind gust magnitudes are compared and analyzed, including 15 183 MGs and 135 240 EGs, both nationally and by state. Nonmeteorological artifacts include marked geographic discontinuities and pronounced “spikes” of an order of magnitude in which EG values (in both miles per hour and knots) end in the digits 0 or 5. Sources such as NWS employees, storm chasers, and the general public overestimate EGs, whereas trained spotters are relatively accurate. Analysis of the ratio of EG to MG and their sources also reveals an apparent warning-verification-influence bias in the climatological distribution of wind gusts imparted by EG reliance in the Southeast. Results from prior wind-tunnel testing of human subjects are applied to 1) illustrate the difference between measured and perceived winds for the database and 2) show the impact on the severe-wind dataset if EGs were bias-corrected for the human overestimation factor.

The Finger of God

The Finger of God Melissa Faliveno (bio) You have not come to a mountain that can be touched and that isburning with fire; to darkness, gloom and storm.hebrews 12:18 It was a warm night in early June—the Midwestern kind of warm specific to spring, the air so thick it's hard to breathe, so wet it feels as if you're swimming—when a tornado struck and destroyed a small town just eight miles west of mine. I was a little over a year old. My mother, who was younger than I am now, came into my bedroom as I slept and looked out the window into the darkness of the west. It was the same window out of which I would look for years to come, whenever the clouds began to build—face and fingers pressed to glass, cranking open the pane to get a better look at the sky. But that night, it was my mother who watched. She looked at the clock and waited. It was just after 11 pm. Maybe the wind was howling. Maybe there was thunder. Maybe, more likely, there was only silence—that still, strange calm Midwesterners know so well, the kind that precedes the most violent of storms. And then she saw them: fast, bright sparks of green, a second or two apart, like flash bulbs in the distance against the dark. It would take her a minute to realize what she was seeing: a massive tornado, invisible in the black of night, striking each pole of the power lines that ran along the highway—the road that connected a small doomed town and our own. Soon she would pick me up, press my small body to her chest, and hurry us down to the room beneath the stairs, a tiny crawlspace where we would huddle together—my father and the cat crammed in with us—and wait out the storm. But for a second or two she stood there in the dark, looking out into the night, as a great, unstoppable force tore through a sleeping town, destroying everything in its path. It was June 8, 1984. The town was called Barneveld, and the tornado—the largest in Wisconsin history—was an f5. On the Fujita scale, the f5 is [End Page 172] the largest, rarest, and most powerful tornado. It carries winds of more than two hundred miles per hour and can stretch up to a mile in width. It has the ability to rip entire houses off their foundations, pluck trees and trucks and livestock from the land and toss them to the sky. The f5 is dangerous, unpredictable, and unforgiving. In the bad nineties action movie Twister, which I watched obsessively as a kid, a group of storm chasers—led by the late Bill Paxton and an unhinged Helen Hunt—pause around a dinner table, on a momentary break from their mission in the Kansas stretch of Tornado Alley, when someone asks what an f5 is like. Commotion at the table ceases; conversation comes to a dramatic halt; forks are placed gravely onto plates. One of the elder chasers on the team, a character nicknamed "Preacher," stops as he serves up a steak. He takes a breath and says: It's the finger of God. I grew up in a small, God-fearing town in southern Wisconsin called Mount Horeb. A blue-collar place dealing in livestock feed and John Deere tractors, with a population back then of just over two thousand, Mount Horeb is perched on a high, sloping hill, surrounded on all sides by long, rolling fields of corn and wheat and soy. Five miles to the west are the Blue Mounds, a state park and tourist attraction that keeps the area on the map: a stretch of low, tree-dotted hills—technically monadnocks, or small mountains, a geological anomaly in that part of the country—with caves beneath them, a line of squat blue peaks that as children we were told protected our little town like a castle's defensive wall. From storms and monsters, the spirits that dwelt in the caves; from whatever else might come our way...

How Much Does “Backing Aloft” Actually Impact a Supercell?

Abstract Among forecasters and storm chasers, there is a common perception that hodographs with counterclockwise curvature or kinking in the midlevels (sometimes called backing aloft or veer–back–veer profiles) are unfavorable for long-lived supercells and tornadoes. This study reviews and then evaluates several possible explanations for the purported negative effect of backing aloft. As a controlled hypothesis test, simulated supercells are initiated within a range of idealized wind profiles, many of which include representative counterclockwise kinks or bends in their hodographs. In these experiments, the short-term, direct impacts of backing aloft upon supercell maintenance are generally small. Backing aloft does modify the component of vertical accelerations linked to updraft–shear interactions, but these changes generally occur well above the level of free convection (LFC), and they are generally offset by substantial upward accelerations attributable to other processes (e.g., within-storm rotation and positive buoyancy). In these simulations, the longevity of isolated supercells seems to be most directly hindered in environments with very low storm-relative helicity (SRH) or else (for a line of supercells) substantial along-line flow in the upper troposphere. Although these two disrupting properties can accompany backing aloft, they are neither universally nor exclusively associated with it. From the perspective of storm dynamics, it seems advisable to focus on SRH and along-line flow in the environment, rather than the presence (or absence) of backing aloft in the wind profile.

Crowdsourcing the El Reno 2013 Tornado: A New Approach for Collation and Display of Storm Chaser Imagery for Scientific Applications

Abstract The 31 May 2013 El Reno, Oklahoma, tornado is used to demonstrate how a video imagery database crowdsourced from storm chasers can be time-corrected and georeferenced to inform severe storm research. The tornado’s exceptional magnitude (∼4.3-km diameter and ∼135 m s−1 winds) and the wealth of observational data highlight this storm as a subject for scientific investigation. The storm was documented by mobile research and fixed-base radars, lightning detection networks, and poststorm damage surveys. In addition, more than 250 individuals and groups of storm chasers navigating the tornado captured imagery, constituting a largely untapped resource for scientific investigation. The El Reno Survey was created to crowdsource imagery from storm chasers and to compile submitted materials in a quality-controlled, open-access research database. Solicitations to storm chasers via social media and e-mail yielded 93 registrants, each contributing still and/or video imagery and metadata. Lightning flash interval is used for precise time calibration of contributed video imagery; when combined with georeferencing from open-source geographical information software, this enables detailed mapping of storm phenomena. A representative set of examples is presented to illustrate how this standardized database and a web-based visualization tool can inform research on tornadoes, lightning, and hail. The project database offers the largest archive of visual material compiled for a single storm event, accessible to the scientific community through a registration process. This approach also offers a new model for poststorm data collection, with instructional materials created to facilitate replication for research into both past and future storm events.

Whilst storm chasing just outside Limon in Colorado near a town called Punkin Center

Whilst storm chasing just outside Limon in Colorado near a town called Punkin Center

Aerial Damage Survey of the 2013 El Reno Tornado Combined with Mobile Radar Data

A detailed damage survey of the El Reno, Oklahoma, tornado of 31 May 2013 combined with rapid-scanning data recorded from two mobile radars is presented. One of the radars was equipped with polarimetric capability. The relationship between several suction vortices visually identified in pictures with the high-resolution Doppler velocity data and swath marks in fields is discussed. The suction vortices were associated with small shear features in Doppler velocity and a partial ringlike feature of high spectral width. For the first time, a suction vortex that created a swath mark in a field was visually identified in photographs and high-definition video while the rotational couplet was tracked by radar. A dual-Doppler wind synthesis of the tornadic circulation at low levels near the location of several storm chaser fatalities resolved ground-relative wind speeds in excess of 90 m s−1, greater than the minimum speed for EF5 damage. The vertical vorticity analysis revealed a rapid transition from a single tornadic vortex centered on the weak-echo hole (WEH) to suction vortices surrounding the WEH and collocated with the ring of enhanced radar reflectivities. Several bands/zones of enhanced convergence were resolved in the wind syntheses. One of the bands was associated with an internal or secondary rear-flank gust front. An inner band of convergence appeared to be a result of the positive bias in tornado-relative radial velocity owing to centrifuging of large lofted debris swirling within the tornado. An outer band of convergence formed at the northern edge of a region of strong inflow that was lofting small debris and dust into the storm.