Good afternoon! Thanks for checking out today’s hazardous weather blog, brought to you by Mr. Quik Home Services out of Indianapolis! You can rely on Mr. Quik’s team of professionals for all your heating, cooling, plumbing, and electrical needs in your home! With the spring storm season here, basements and crawlspaces are prone to flooding. It would be a great time to get your sump pump inspected, or possibly get a new one installed to handle all the downpours this spring and summer! Call Mr. Quik at 317-468-9170. Read more about it at mrquikhomeservices.com. Be sure to “LIKE” Mr. Quik on Facebook, where BAM Wx provides daily updates: https://www.facebook.com/MisterQuik/.
Wednesday marked the 45th anniversary of the April 3-4th, 1974 tornado outbreak. This was the most devastating, deadly outbreak in history, and we have yet to see an event rival quite this, particularly in Indiana. 19 tornadoes touched down in Indiana alone, with 148 tornadoes across the region. 315 people were killed. 27,000 families suffered property losses. Here is a map of tornado tracks here in Indiana:
What was truly remarkable was how long these tornadoes stayed on the ground. The longest tracked tornado of whole event happened here in Indiana, tracking from just west of Lafayette, devastating the city of Monticello, and remained on the ground for 121 miles to Lagrange, Indiana. Here is a map showing the strength of these tornadoes and their respective path. Two F-5 ‘s tracked across southeast Indiana, and the Monticello tornado in northern Indiana was an F-4. Annually, only 2% of tornadoes produce EF-4/5 damage. In this event, roughly 20% of tornadoes did that.
As you can imagine, the synoptic weather set-up featured a strong low pressure tracking across the central Plains to the Great Lakes, with a tremendous about of shear and instability. The warm sector featured temperatures soaring near 80º that afternoon. Here is a surface map with temperatures from 2pm April 3rd.
During the afternoon and evening, the cold front approached and multiple, supercell storms developed throughout the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys. The perfect amount of wind shear (strong speed shear to sustain storms, and impressive directional shear with rapid veering of winds in the lower levels of the atmosphere. People I have talked to recall how warm, humid, and windy it was! The Monticello Tornado began near Brookston in southern White county at 4:50PM ET, then continued on to hit the heart of Monticello. The tornado then impacted Rochester and Talma, and continued northeast from there. Nearly all of downtown Monticello was heavily damaged or destroyed. In Monticello, 8 people were killed and 350 injured, 6 killed in Fulton, 1 Kosciusko, and 1 in Noble. In today’s dollars, the damage would be estimated at $420 million. Of all the top damaging tornadoes since 1890, this tornado was ranked #20.
The deadliest tornado of all took place in Xenia, Ohio. This tornado touched down at 4:30PM 9 miles southwest of the city and continued northeast for 32 miles. The Xenia Tornado killed 32 people. About half of the buildings in the city of 27,000 were damaged, and 300 homes were destroyed. 7 of the 12 schools in Xenia were destroyed. Thankfully, this happened roughly an hour after school dismissed. 9 churches in Xenia were destroyed. Here is a iconic picture from the Green Memorial Hospital.
Enhanced Fujita scale vs old Fujita scale: The new scale for rating tornadoes was implemented in 2007, to replace to old Fujita scale. This new scale is much more practical as it takes into account the strengths and weaknesses of different construction types. The same wind speed will cause different levels of damage to different kinds of structures (an unanchored mobile home vs a well built house will have different levels of damage). The old Fujita scale took no account of construction quality and variability, and no definitive correlation between damage and wind speed. This led to inconsistent tornado ratings. The new scale classifies EF0-5 tornadoes that was calibrated by engineers.
Summer is approaching! Our summer outlook webinar is coming up April 24th at 11am EDT!! We will have a informative discussion about what to expect this summer including the risks in the forecast, along with a live Q & A! Jot down some questions and ask us during the webinar. It’s FREE!! **If you can not watch the webinar live, you can still watch it afterwards on the webinar link, as long as you sign-up beforehand!! Link: bamwx.com/webinar
With spring in full swing, there are many outdoor events taking place in the months ahead! Does your business revolve around weather and need an accurate, personable weather forecast? Here are some reasons why you should look into what we offer vs. everything else:
Why would I pay for a weather service when I can get free weather on my phone? Relying on free weather information such as free, automated weather apps is not practical if you want to run a successful business. They are solely based on raw computer model output with zero human element. These free apps also have a tendency to send you erroneous alerts about rain or snow coming, even when there isn’t a cloud in the sky! I can’t count with my own fingers how many times I get incorrect snow/rain alerts to my phone. I have more examples than this picture below, but I think you get the point.
What our service can provide you:
24/7 on-call meteorologist support: This is the HUGE benefit of our service!! Having your own personal meteorologists to contact 24/7 is key for sound business decisions whether it’s 3pm or 3am. We alway have a meteorologist on duty to get in immediate touch with! We truly enjoy communicating with our clients whether it’s a high-risk weather event or sunny and 75! We can assist you in every weather situation Mother Nature can bring us. The goal of this is to make your job easier! Stop stressing over a thunderstorm popping up on radar during your event. Have us on-call to tell you what to expect throughout the event.
Accuracy: We HAVE to do our very best to get every detail in a forecast correct. Every member of our team has a keen knowledge of weather patterns in the Ohio Valley. Each storm presents its own challenges. We strive to get every detail in a forecast correct from snow and ice accumulations down to freezing drizzle and fog, and of course, severe storms. We wouldn’t have a business if we didn’t hold ourselves accountable for getting the forecast correct. Knowing the fine-details in the forecast can be the difference between making $5000 or losing $5000. The time has come to quit guessing which local television/radio/app forecast is correct and waiting to check the latest local television forecast. This can take too much time and cause frustration. Think of it this way, it would be wiser to spend $1500 now on a weather service like ours than to lose $50,000 later because you were trying to guess the outcome.
We can also set-up a Thor Guard lightning prediction system at your event. This is better than most systems as this predicts conditions favorable for a lightning strike to alert you ahead of time, instead of other systems that alert you for a lightning strike that has already occurred.
You can inquire at bamwx.com/contact-us or [email protected].
Our commercial personal subscription will get you a daily, detailed local weather forecast (available anywhere in the central/northern Plains to the Ohio Valley), and a long-range forecast. Monthly outlooks out to 6 months always available, and long-range forecasts are updated daily with forecasts based on research and not just pure models. This + the on-call option gives you an amazing package of information and your own personal meteorologist which means you always know what to expect. It’s so much better than any weather packages you have seen before!
For weather enthusiasts who are just looking for updates during active weather, we also offer a $50 per year Midwest Extreme Weather subscription to keep you updated during active weather in the Midwest!!
