The DebrisBallers’s Podcast

131 mph - that's how strong winds in a recent Dakotas thunderstorm were!  Strong enough to topple giant a wind turbine and do a lot of other damage. On this episode the Ballers will tell you all about it including the amazing job local NWS offices did to properly message the threat level of the storm

Weather events over the past few years like Hurricanes Ian and Helen have taken hundreds of American lives. Other major weather events like tornadoes and ice storms have had catastrophic impacts. Before 2023 the NWS would regularly perform a publicly available Service Assessment after events like these that would highlight the positive aspects of the agency's response while also formulating ideas for future improvement. Since 2023- crickets!  In this episode the Ballers will take a deep dive into the importance of these formal reviews and discuss some ideas for getting things back on track.

In this episode the Ballers discuss a June tornado in Kansas that quickly spun up and killed a man in a mobile home. There was no tornado warning in effect when the storm struck, but as your hosts will reveal it would have been almost no way for one to be issued given how quickly the storm strengthened.

18 minutes - that's how long it took the NWS to issue a tornado warning for parts of western Arkansas on June 6th despite clear evidence of a tornado on radar and multiple reports of a tornado in their internal chatroom. In this episode the Ballers take a closer look at what was happening in real time and offer some advice on how to avoid this happening in the future.

In this episode the Debris Ballers take a close look at the Tornado Emergency. The Tornado Emergency was first used in 1999 by the NWS office in Norman when devastating tornadoes struck central OK.  It took 17 more years before the Tornado Emergency became an official NWS product and we'll share the story of that journey. We'll also discuss a recent tornado in Nebraska where a Tornado Emergency was issued and no tornado occurred.

In this episode we take a deeper dive into how storm warnings are actually issued. Warning polygons are a huge improvement over the county based warnings of the early 2000s but they offer some challenges for the warning forecaster and end user alike. 

Strong Mississippi tornadoes, a surprise tornado in West Virginia, and a look back at the first event we covered in Michigan where the NWS seems to think warnings were in place ahead of all the tornadoes. Check it out on our latest podcast.

It's time for episode 5 from the Debris Ballers. This time around we're going to take a look back at the week of April 13th which featured a couple surprise severe weather episodes and one very well advertised outbreak later in the week.

The Ballers meet to discuss the massive tornado, and potential record large hailstone, that affected northern Illinois on March 10th.  

The Ballers take a deeper look at the March 6th tornadoes over Michigan and explore issues related to the Watch/Warning system in the US.