I’m going to take a shot at rebuilding the narrative lost in last night’s timeout fiasco—only better, because as I recall I was getting the feeling the narrative as I wrote it was not a real potboiler anyway. And that close to midnight I don’t do real well in things that require mental agility…
For the last several days there’s been a stubborn, slow-moving storm system draped across the South, and as a result we’ve had mostly stormy days this past week. On Monday the storm track ran right over Coweta County (current place of non-virtual residence), so that the thunderstorms were almost continuous all day. How I got anything done online I don’t recall, but I must have, since Flyover did get posted that day.
Yesterday (Friday) was a bit different. The storm track was well to our north so we only had two thunderstorms come through all day. But the thing to know about thunderstorms is that when they break off from the normal track it’s because they’re stronger than normal. And in almost every case when they break free of the steering currents they veer off to the right. So when thunderstorms paid us a visit Friday morning and again Friday afternoon, they both occasioned official National Weather Service severe thunderstorm warnings.
Now, my wife Chris and I are “hams”—licensed amateur radio operators—and we participate in the local ham radio club’s severe weather net when we can, and when Chris is at work at the local NWS office she sometimes operates the office’s ham station to collect spotter reports from these nets. Since I was home all day Friday I acted as a spotter, watching for the things that make a severe storm severe around my home.
Most people when they think of hams they think of people with huge towers in their yards who spend their free time yakking with people on the other side of the world. In our club there are those who do that, but most ham activity is in the higher, shorter-range frequencies where we can use little hand-sized radios to talk within the general Newnan area. By themselves these handhelds can’t transmit even across town, but the club operates “repeaters” on these frequencies that rebroadcast our transmissions with more power and from a higher elevation, allowing more coverage. These repeaters are what storm spotting hams use to track what’s happening with severe weather when we have a net going.
Under normal circumstances I don’t even use my ham radio—but the weather nets are a special case.
I grew up in Sacramento, where severe weather pretty much meant temperatures over 110 degrees in summer. There were thunderstorms, and hailstorms, and reports of funnel clouds, but people from the Great Plains would laugh themselves into a coma at what people in California’s Central Valley considered bad weather. So when I came to Georgia in 1999 and learned that Newnan had experienced a tornado in recent years, I was a little concerned. Then came tornado watches and severe thunderstorm warnings, and I discovered that however useful The Weather Channel might be, it couldn’t provide me the kind of realtime storm tracking that would demystify severe weather for me. In the absence of up-to-the-millisecond information, I could only imagine what was headed my way when the wind was blowing, the rain was coming down in—never mind cats and dogs—lions and elephants, and lightning was killing trees just up the street from my house. Is the storm rotating? Why is the scud going one way and the clouds above going the opposite direction? If this place has a tornado siren, is it close enough for me to hear? And—gulp!—the cable is out, and there goes the power, and how am I going to keep track of this monster and know what’s going on?
And that’s why I work the severe weather nets. If I never learn Morse code, if I never get to converse with a fellow ham on the other side of the world, I’m getting something personally worthwhile out of this license.
Maybe one day we’ll find ourselves living on the Great Plains, and if so I’ll be up to the challenge.
