What Stands in a Storm (6 page)

Every morning during the school year, Spann drives to an elementary school somewhere in Alabama. For more than two decades, he has been giving this weather talk—the same one he gave the day he met Jason Simpson in the high school parking lot—and it has evolved into a presentation with stunning photographs and cool videos that make students gasp and laugh and wonder. Teachers book him a year in advance.

The students are anywhere from first to sixth graders, and they cannot wait to meet a celebrity they watch every night on TV. To welcome him, they color posters of tornadoes and sleet and hurricanes and hang them all over the halls, or the school library, or the auditorium where they gather for a celebrity assembly.

“He's a superstar!” teachers say. “When he comes here we get as excited as the students, 'cause we always learn something, too.”

Spann's talk lays an approachable foundation for understanding the atmosphere and, ultimately, tornadoes. He does this to get kids excited about science, because whatever the kids learn, they go home and teach their parents. And when the weather turns, they will herd their parents into the hall closet and shame them into wearing a football or bike helmet.

On a recent talk, James addressed several fifth-grade classes gathered in an elementary school library.

“Everybody breathe in!” James said to the assembly. “Breathe out!”

The library audibly exhaled.

“That was a science experiment!” James said. “You proved that there's
air
in here!”

The fifth graders giggled. Air has weight, he explained—not enough to feel—but a little weight that can be measured by a . . .

Barometer!
the fifth graders yelled in unison. They always knew more than the first graders, and he could count on their participation. He was most comfortable around people this age, more so than around adults, and certainly more so than around the seventh graders, who were approaching the evil age of thirteen, when it is no longer cool to yell out in an assembly.

“Yes! That's where these numbers come from,” James said, the screen behind him flashing to a picture of today's weather map. “These are units of pressure called millibars, and when the barometer's like, really really high, what letter shows up?”

H!

“When you see an
H
on a weather map, that means the air there is kinda heavier than the surrounding air. And when something's heavy, it doesn't go up. It goes where?”

Down!

“When air sinks, it crushes the clouds away. It's like, sunny. So typically, when you see an
H
it's kinda sunny. And in the winter it's also kinda what?”

Cold!

“Cold air is heavy. But around these lows, air tends to be light. The winds converge. Air goes where?”

Up!

“When air goes up, you get clouds and rain. So half my job is figuring out if air is going up or if air is going . . .”

Down!

“Wait a minute. If air is going up, and air is going down, that means air has what?”

Silence.

“Waves—like the ocean. You just can't see them,” James said, showing them a pressure map that looked like a topographical map, with blobs of concentric circles and contour lines that depicted barometric pressure instead of altitude.

He showed them a video of the National Weather Service releasing a weather balloon, explaining that this happens every day, twice a day, all around the world at exactly the same time. In the video, the man holding the balloon, twice his height and filled with hydrogen, was nearly dragged off his feet by the wind. The students cackled with laughter. Once he let go, the balloon rose into the atmosphere, carrying a radiosonde, a toaster-size box of instruments that measure wind, temperature, pressure, and moisture. A radio transmitted the measurements, which were compiled into the weather maps he studies every day, like a soothsayer reading tea leaves. Eventually the balloon would pop, and the radiosonde would float back to earth on a parachute. Radiosondes that don't land in lakes or oceans or trees are discovered in fields and backyards and mailed back to the National Weather Service. Less than 20 percent are ever returned.

James also showed them a photo of a satellite 22,500 miles over the equator, moving in an orbit that matches the planet's rotation, hovering above the same spot on the earth. If you gazed up at it at night with the naked eye, you might mistake it for a star. Weather satellites take a picture of the planet every few minutes; shown in succession, they look like a movie of break-dancing clouds.

“I can't imagine doing my job without these, and they didn't have these before about 1960. We also have a tool that lets us see where the rain is falling. It is called a . . .”

Radar!

The radar device looked like a giant volleyball perched on top of a tower. Inside the white sphere (a protective cover that keeps out the elements) is a machine that looks like a giant gun.

“This thing is on a motor and it spins around all day long and shoots out little pulses of electromagnetic energy,” James said. “What's
cool about these little pulses, when they run into a target, like a raindrop, part of the energy will bounce off the raindrop and bounce back to the antenna. Happens faster than you can blink your eye. We make maps of where the bounces are, and the maps look just like this.”

The screen looked like a tie-dyed shirt from the 1960s. Blues and greens mean light rain, he explained. The angry splotches of yellow and red mean heavy rain or hail, and those splotches sometimes come in the shape of a comma that had fallen over on its face. Most kids would first notice the fiery colors of the arc, but the dot of the comma is where the danger lies.

“That's the debris ball,” James said. That invariably excited them.

At least once a semester, the kids in his audience practiced a tornado drill, which meant curling into the “tornado turtle” in the halls, or putting books over their heads. Every student in the state had done it.

The most valuable thing Spann teaches the kids is this: When a meteorologist says to get to a safe place, he means the smallest room on the lowest floor, in the center of the house, away from windows. And:
Do not wait to hear a siren
.

“A lot of people think they need to hear a siren. Please, guys—
no!
” he said, over and over, to countless parents and to school and library groups. “I hate sirens.
I hate 'em!
There are days I want to take 'em down and burn 'em.”

Spann and other experts believe that sirens are a deadly problem. People wait to act until they hear a siren, but sirens cannot always be heard indoors. Intended to warn people working outdoors and far from better sources of weather information, sirens are an anachronistic WWII relic unworthy of the authority people place in them. Lives are lost because people wait to hear a siren before taking shelter.

Spann called this misplaced faith in sirens the “siren mentality.” The National Weather Service is required to issue a warning for tornadoes of any size—even the smallest, which may dissipate in seconds and rarely cause much harm. A warning triggers sirens across
the whole county, even though the actual path of danger is considerably smaller. And so when people hear an alarm, they notice it is often closely followed by . . . nothing. Spann believes that meteorologists are overwarning, in part because improved technology is better at detecting smaller, weaker tornadoes that would have been missed in the past.

Spann hoped to be part of the solution, though he could actually change little about the warning system. But he had changed the ways Alabamians received and understood his forecasts, using Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and podcasts—any tool he had—to warn of approaching storms. Unlike TV weather, which provided him exactly two minutes three times a day, new media allowed him enough air time to fully qualify his forecasts with an explicit degree of uncertainty. He could respond to viewer questions and send updates as often as needed. He tried to answer every question viewers sent by e-mail, which numbered into the hundreds on any given day.

James wrapped up his elementary school weather talks by handing his video camera to a student and filming the children waving and cheering. He told kids he would put them on the news that night, but only if they promised to do an urgent homework assignment:

“If you don't have a weather radio, go home and pester your parents till they buy one. That sounds the alarm in your home. You'll know the tornado is coming and you'll turn on the TV and I promise we'll be there, and you can see how close you are and you can do something if you need to. But everyone needs a weather radio. That's a baseline.”

Spann always ended his talks—to audiences of kids and colleagues alike—with a reminder that this was a science of probability, not certainty, and that it was easy to get overconfident.

“The greatest thing our science needs is humility,” he said. “We still have a lot to learn.”

9:30 A.M., WEDNESDAY, APRIL 27, 2011—SMITHVILLE, MISSISSIPPI

At Smithville High School, the hallways were humming with talk of tornadoes. As the screams of the sirens penetrated the cinder-block walls of the school, students and teachers stopped Johnny Parker between classes.

“Is it over?” they asked.

Johnny shook his head and responded, word by halting word.

“More . . . are . . . on . . . the . . . way.”

Johnny had been monitoring discussions by the National Weather Service and Storm Prediction Center since last week. This morning at six o'clock he had bent his six-foot frame over the desktop computer in the study, examining the swirling radar and scanning the severe weather updates. Dr. Greg Forbes of the Weather Channel was predicting a 90 percent chance of seeing a tornado within a fifty-mile radius of any given point in Johnny's stretch of Mississippi. That was the highest probability that Johnny had ever seen.

At 6:17 a.m., Johnny dispatched an e-mail forecast that warned of the possibility of strong tornadoes, baseball-size hail, damaging winds up to eighty miles per hour, and flash flooding. His warning left no room for misinterpretation:

A major and very dangerous tornado outbreak will occur across the South today. The greatest threat for Tornadoes will
be from Northeast MS, most of Alabama, Southern parts of Tennessee, and parts of Georgia.

Most weathermen can remember a childhood storm, a meteorological awakening that inspired their lifelong passion for weather. Johnny's defining storm had toppled a magnificent apple tree that stood guard over his front yard, a lovely canopy in whose shade he had spent long childhood afternoons swinging and playing. That this benign and giving tree could turn murderous seemed inconceivable until he saw how closely it had come to crushing his house. He was only four, with bright blue eyes and dirty-blond curls, but the details of the storm were tattooed into his memory—the streaks of lightning, the house shuddering in gusts of wind, the crack and grumble of thunder all through the angry night. When the sun came out, the young boy stood before that ancient, mangled tree, grasping for the very first time the awesome, staggering power of the sky. But instead of fear, Johnny felt a hunger to know, to study these storms, to understand what made them go and how something invisible could be so powerful. If he came to understand these storms, could he warn his family? Could he keep them safe?

As Johnny grew, so did his fascination. In elementary school, he preferred the weather over cartoons. In middle school, he would stand in the living room and gesture in front of the TV, mimicking the motions of the local weatherman. He made a hobby out of tracking hurricanes and longed to live on a coast so he could one day see the middle of one. He read meteorology books for fun, and he parked himself in front of the Weather Channel during every big event: Andrew. Wilma. Katrina. Ivan. He collected hurricanes as if they were baseball cards. When he was fourteen, he spent a year cataloging every hurricane that had spiraled around the world. His list dated back to 1492.

That same year he attended a National Weather Service seminar to become a trained storm spotter. For every Christmas and birthday, instead of wishing for video games, he begged for radar software. He
taught himself how to read weather maps and how to write a forecast. In eleventh grade, Johnny went to Tupelo to visit his idol, the WTVA meteorologist Dick Rice, whom he had previously interviewed for a high school project, and helped compose the day's forecast, which Rice delivered on the ten o'clock news.

Johnny also idolized Jim Cantore, the Weather Channel celebrity whose presence in any coastal town assured residents of a coming hurricane. Johnny believed he would one day become, like Cantore, an operational meteorologist, focusing on forecasts, even though his speech impediment precluded a broadcast career. As he typed his daily forecasts, he dreamed of ways to become a new kind of weatherman, and by seventeen, he had started his own private meteorology company, Parker Weather Service, to practice his craft.

The idea came as Johnny was sitting at his computer, thinking of new ways to dispatch his forecasts. He glanced down at his phone and had an idea: a weather text. He started out with thirty-two “customers”—mostly friends and family who supported his passion—and he texted abbreviated forecasts to batches of ten, the maximum his phone carrier would allow. When the word got out, he got so many new requests that he couldn't keep up with the texts, so he added daily e-mails. He had a pretty good forecast batting average. Every once in a while he hit a home run, like he did on the Christmas of his junior year, when he predicted the rare and beautiful event of a Mississippi white Christmas.