ALERT Newsletter – September 2013

Hi everybody and welcome to your September 2013 Newsletter. We had a great meeting last month & I would like to welcome our newest ALERT members, Dale Chambers KD4QHZ, John Gray KF4LKO, Jay Hamaker KK4ORI & Matthew (Matt) Hamaker KK4PTB. Welcome aboard! Our next regular meeting will be September 10th at 7 PM. There will be a short Board of Directors meeting preceding the regular meeting, scheduled at 6:30 PM. I hope to see you there! …………………………………………………………………………………………………….. Tropical Advisory Notifications For many years I have received tropical updates via email from the National Hurricane Center. Recently GovDelivery discontinued this service due “to the substantial costs of providing a messaging service at this scale with high reliability”. This of course left me with the dilemma of finding another source for this information. Well, I have good news as I have found an alternate source for the NHC advisories. This source is courtesy of our cousins at the Hurricane Watch Net (HWN). The HWN operates WX4NHC for the National Hurricane Center. The net activates on 14.325 MHz when a storm is within 300 miles of a populated land mass. The HWN provides a free email advisory service, which includes a Tropical Weather Outlook issued 4 times daily. Public and Forecast Advisories (issued only when a storm has formed) are issued 4 times daily. Intermediate Advisories are issued every 3 hours when coastal watches and warnings are in effect, and every 2 hours when costal watches and warnings are in effect and land based radar has identified a reliable storm center. Plus any Special Statements issued are passed along. To subscribe to these advisories go to the following links: Atlantic – http://hwn.org/mailman/listinfo/atlantic_hwn.org Pacific – http://hwn.org/mailman/listinfo/epac_hwn.org Central Pacific – http://hwn.org/mailman/listinfo/cpac_hwn.org They will ask for your email address, name and you must choose a password and whether you want the advisories sent batched in a digest form or individually. You then will receive a confirmation email that you just hit “reply” to and send. Then you are all set. With the peak of hurricane season now arriving, even though this season has been a sleeper so far, this is a resource you should take full advantage of. Many thanks to the Hurricane Watch Net! The Hurricane Watch net, by the way, is a net where, you usually don’t check in to, only listen. Only if you have a legitimate need to check in do you do so, such as emergency or priority traffic or if the NCS specifically calls for a station in Central Alabama, or they unless they issue a general call for check-in’s should you even reach for the microphone. Once upon a time a Hurricane, which if I remember correctly was Gilbert, was rearranging Jamaica & the NCS asked “do we have any stations in the affected area, the affected area only?” Some Gent from zero-land, piped in and very slowly drawled out “This is Kay Zero Que Arr Emmm, Homer over in Tulsa Oklahoma, just wanting to tell you fellers what a fine job, a fine job you fellers are doing. And, if I can be of any help, any help at all just let me know. This is Homer, K0QRM, over in Tulsa Oklahoma on frequency and standing by on the side.” Fifteen distress calls probably could have been received and handled in the time it took Homer to get “on the side”. Learn from a bad example. Don’t do this. When activated, a live audio feed of the Net is available at http://14300stream.homeip.net:88/broadwave.asx?src=fhwn&kbps=16 To check for updates and net activation notifications go to http://www.hwn.org/ Remember 14.325 MHz USB & give it a try! ………………………………………………………………………………………. Hints & Kinks For Tracking Hurricanes By A Rank Amateur I’ve always enjoyed trying to second-guess the National Hurricane Center. It’s fun! Many times our forecasts agree, they have outguessed me an honorable number of times & every now and then, when Divine Providence intervenes, I have beaten them. The following are some random hints and items I have stored in my dusty brain, which every now and then come into play in making my ever-knowledgeable guesses. The maximum number of tropical systems that the Atlantic Basin, which includes the Gulf and the Caribbean, can contain and support is four simultaneous storms. If major tropical systems get too close to one another they don’t merge as thunderstorms often do. The upper level winds associated with each storm will counteract or buffet each other preventing this from occurring. If you have a large storm and a smaller storm enters the influence or wind field of the larger storm, the smaller storm will tend to rotate counterclockwise around the primary storm in a process called the Fujiwhara Effect. If the smaller storm is very weak, say a tropical storm versus a Category 4 storm, it is possible that the smaller storm’s circulation can be totally disrupted by the larger storm and then it can be absorbed into the larger storm’s circulation. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNjUSsqJgek&feature=relmfu as Typhoon Ma-On gobbles up Tropical Storm Tokage in 2011. Tropical systems, for all of their tremendous energy, are totally without an engine or steering mechanism, but are at the mercy of the whims of the upper level winds. A tropical system can spin all it wants to, but unless the storms thunderstorm columns reach high enough to snag the upper level winds, and then act as a sail, that Bubba is going nowhere fast. If the upper level winds die down, the storm can drift aimlessly for days. If the storm sits still long enough, it will begin to dissipate due to it stirring up the deeper cooler waters beneath it and it cooling the sea surface temperature below the 80 degree critical threshold needed to sustain a tropical storm. This is “upwelling”. The one exception to this rule is if it is sitting over the Gulf Stream, as the incoming current will continually replenish the warm water beneath the storm. Tropical systems cannot penetrate frontal boundaries. If you see that a front will be approaching the coast from the West, don’t worry about the coast, as it will either stall the storm, deflect it to the Northeast or as in the case of 2009’s Tropical Storm Danny, it can absorb a weak storm. Theoretically Tropical Storms will lose strength over land. The 1997 version of Danny (which passed over Birmingham and then headed east towards Atlanta) forgot this and strengthened while over the swamps of South Carolina and then moved into the Atlantic as a rejuvenated system heading for New England. The theory at that time was that the swamps were so warm and humid that the storm “thought” it was over the sea. Now they say it was due to the effects a frontal system closely following the storm. I always preferred the first explanation, as it seemed more logical. Storms named “Danny” and I are old companions. In 1985 I accidentally managed to intercept Hurricane Danny a few hours after it struck Louisiana. I remember the feeder bands passing with heavy rain and gusts, and then it calming and clearing in between waves. “Looks like it can’t decide whether it’s coming or going” said the old guy at a truck stop where I was refueling. I also remember making a ham sandwich for an old dog at a rest stop. Old Shep looked hungry, so I fixed him one. He woofed it down, thanked me kindly and then disappeared into the mist. If a storm strikes just West of Alabama, expect sorry weather. If it strikes just East of Alabama, expect dry weather and lowering humidity, as the storm drags the moisture away with it. If a 120 MPH storm is moving North at 20 MPH the wind field around the eye will be effected as follows. The winds on the Eastern side combine and are in effect 140 MPH, while the winds to the West subtract and are in effect 100 MPH. This is the “fast moving hurricane rule”. My source for all of the preceding information was the late John Hope of the National Hurricane Center and later, the Weather Channel. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Mark’s Almanac September is the ninth month of the year and the seventh month of the Roman calendar, which is where the month gets its name. Temperatures are still hot at the beginning of the month, but, by months end, fall will definitely be felt. Noticeable in September will be the thickening of the cat’s fur, as she begins growing her winter coat & the drift of Yellow Giant Sulphur Butterflies as they migrate towards Florida. Weather starts shifting from the summer to autumn pattern and then back again. Storm activity resembles the August pattern, but the Bermuda High starts shifting southward and begins weakening, which will weaken the blocking effect it has had which prevented fronts from invading from the northwest. September is the peak of the hurricane season, the actual peak being on September 10. This peak coincides with the time of “syzygy”, when the combination of the solar and lunar gravity and autumnal equinox combine to provide the highest astronomical tides of the year. Add a hurricane’s storm surge on top of this and you can have incredibly destructive flooding. Fall begins at Autumnal Equinox on September 22, 2012 at 3:44 P.M. CDT, when the Sun crosses directly over the equator and night and day is approximately the same length. One term that occasionally pops up is “equinoctial storms”. Which are severe storms in North America and the UK that supposedly accompany the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. Where this belief originated is obscure. Some say perhaps from the 1700’s when sailors were greeted by West Indies hurricanes, or due to the coincidence of the first fall severe storms sometimes coming in the latter half of September. At any rate, statistics show no evidence to support the belief. On this date, if there is sufficient solar activity, and you are away from city lights, the aurora may possibly be seen, as the Equinox dates are the two most favored times of the year for auroral sightings. High in the Southern night sky an asterism or a group of stars appearing clustered together, but not actually gravitationally bound will be seen that resembles a teapot. This is the Teapot of Sagittarius. To the naked eye, the Teapot is roughly the size of your fist at arm’s length. Above the spout of the Teapot lies a band of light, which is the Large Sagittarius Star Cloud. A pair of binoculars will reveal a sea of stars and faint grayish patches, the largest of which is the Lagoon Nebula. When you look upon these nebulae you are seeing stars in the process of being born. The spout also points towards the galactic center of the Milky Way, located just beyond the Large Sagittarius Star cloud, but largely hidden by the dust clouds, which lie along the plane of the Sagittarius arm of the galaxy. Looking closer to home Mercury is hidden in the glare of the Sun. Our neighbor, Venus shines brightly low in the west-southwest. In a telescope Venus is still small and in its gibbous phase being 75% sunlit. Venus and Mercury, being inside the Earth’s orbit, have phases just as the Moon does. Mars and Jupiter shine in the east before and during dawn. Jupiter is the highest and brightest. Look for faint Mars far to Jupiter’s lower left. Saturn glows in the southwest as twilight fades. Uranus and Neptune are well up toward the southeast by 11 p.m. September’s Full Moon will occur September 19 at 6:13 AM. This month’s moon is “Full Corn Moon” in Native American folklore. This year it is also “Harvest Moon”. So called because the moon is larger and seems to rise at almost the same time every night, which allowed harvesting to continue on into the night. Most believe that Harvest Moon is always in September; however this isn’t always the case. Harvest Moon is actually the full moon closest to the Autumnal Equinox, and so occasionally it can occur with October “Hunters Moon”. September is National Chicken Month – which is certainly something to crow about. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. This month’s meeting will be on September 10 at 7PM at the National Weather Service Forecast office at the Shelby County Airport. There will be a Board of Directors meeting shortly before the regular meeting. Mark / WD4NYL Editor ALERT www.freewebs.com/weatherlynx