Well, that _was_ neat!

Last night was the night that the local Weather Service traveling team
came to Norman (their HQ town) to teach the SKYWARN/Storm_Spotter
class.

Two hours of good stuff, good sense, and truly astonishing stills,
radar and other imagery, and video. Some of the very best weather
pix I've seen, ever, despite being associated with weather folks and
tornado spotters/chasers for 35 years now.

One _magnificent_ image, taken from miles away, showed an entire storm
from top to bottom: all the way from the top of the BIG FSCKING ANVIL
to the wall cloud and tornado funnel tearing up things on the ground.

I hadn't until last night realized I live in the tornado capitol of
the entire world, and in the Big Hail capitol of the world as well. I
guess the National Severe Storm Laboratory is here for a reason.

Some fun last night, too, discussing imaginative measuring sticks for
hailstone size: in addition to the usual "dime/penny/nickel/quarter"
size hail, the "egg/golfball/baseball/orange/softball" size hail,
and the occasional cantaloupe size hail, the instructor said that
one fellow reported that the hail was as big as a cat's head. OK.
Whatever.

Any way, I are now a qualified Storm Spotter and SKYWARN operator, for
what that's worth, and so is Melody. Let's hope we don't need to use
the skills.

And if you get a chance to take the training (probably available only
in CONUS), take it. It's a _good_ example of what your tax dollars can
do for you when spent wisely, and there're too damn few.

Them as might be interested in finding out what's happening during
severe weather can usually find an amateur radio repeater that has
SKYWARN traffic when things get bumpy. All you need is a 2m-capable
scanner. Again, probably CONUS only; I don't know what the rest of the
world does about severe WX.

--
"Bother", said Pooh, kicking the headless corpse of Piglet.
-- Dragon Prince, in the Monastery
.

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