Alabama meteorologists remember April 27, 2011 tornadoes
Advances in technology have improved the way we receive severe weather alerts in recent years. (contributed)
Like many Alabamians, National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologist John De Block will never forget April 27, 2011.
“I never thought when I arrived at work at 4 a.m. that morning that I would be issuing tornado warnings within 10 minutes,” De Block said. “That’s indeed what happened.”
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De Block and his colleagues at the NWS forecast office in Calera spent the next 18 hours issuing dozens of tornado warnings. By the end of the day 62 tornadoes had struck Alabama – the most to ever hit the state in one day, killing as many as 252 people and injuring 2,200 others, according to official sources.
“A lot of emotions and memories from that event, and then we get into the days after, of inspecting the damage and rating the tornadoes,” De Block said. “It was a time in my life I will never forget.”
Four months after the tornadoes, a 19-member Tornado Recovery Action Council (TRAC) was assembled to study the tragedy and develop recommendations to help Alabama better prepare for and respond to future natural disasters. In January 2012, TRAC released its report, praising the quick response of first responders, volunteers, utilities and government agencies, but also offering 20 recommendations to address critical issues concerning preparation, warning, response and recovery.
“We learned there are ways to improve,” wrote TRAC co-chairs Pam Siddall and John D. Johns in the report. “We wanted to create a path for recovery and renewal with common-sense solutions. We wanted proposals that would increase preparedness without unduly expanding the footprint of government.”
How severe weather warnings have changed in 10 years from Alabama NewsCenter on Vimeo.
More Weather Alert Options
One of the greatest lessons learned from the 2011 tornado outbreak is everyone’s need to have more than one way of receiving severe weather alerts. While the responsibility of issuing severe weather warnings rests solely with the NWS, delivering the warnings to the public is undertaken by a number of public and private entities in a variety of ways, including NOAA Weather Radio, TV and radio stations, social media channels, emergency management agencies and weather alert services.
“Our technology is great but on any given day what are the chances of all of them working?” De Block said. “Things happen – power goes out, batteries get exhausted, your phone might be down on charge, so you’ve got that weather radio standing by. That’s why we have that backup, that other system that we’re going to use to get that notification if the other does not work.”
In 2012 Baron Weather announced its SAF-T-Net severe weather alert service would be free to all Alabamians. (contributed)
In February 2012 – one month after the release of TRAC’s report, Bob Baron, president and founder of Baron Services in Huntsville, filled one of TRAC’s 20 recommendations by gifting his company’s private SAF-T-Net weather alert system to everyone in Alabama. Initially created as a voice, text and email alert system in the aftermath of the 1989 Huntsville tornado, Alabama SAF-T-Net has evolved into a smartphone app capable of delivering severe weather alerts for your current location and custom street addresses across Alabama.
“It was something that I felt could really assist the citizenry in the state so we just went ahead and did it,” Baron said. “We felt like the state has been so good to us that we needed to be good to them.”
Since May 2011 the number of Americans who own a smartphone has risen from 35% to more than 80%. Alabama’s ABC 33/40 Chief Meteorologist James Spann said the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 revolutionized the way he and other meteorologists deliver weather information.
“In 2011 smartphones were about four years old and a lot of people still did not have them, but now just about everybody carries a phone, so we can reach them on that phone in their safe place,” Spann said. “Instead of watching TV on a wall-mounted flat screen, they can take us with them down to their safe place, wherever that happens to be.”
Spann said the rapid adoption of smartphones mixed with the growth of social media use gives meteorologists access to more pictures and video in a shorter amount of time.
“Social media gives us the ability to get images and video from all over, which we didn’t really have in 2011,” Spann said. “We had some people on Twitter and Facebook but not the masses that we do now. Everybody has got a phone and now everybody’s got a camera and the ability to get that back to us is really important.”
Social Science: Turning Words into Action
James Spann says social science has helped him and other meteorologists improve the weather warning process. (contributed)
In 2019, Spann published “Weathering Life,” an autobiography tracing his early years growing up in Greenville to his rise as a well-known meteorologist. Spann said he had no plans to write the book until the April 27, 2011, tornado outbreak.
“If you look back on April 27th, the warnings were really good, but yet all of these people died,” Spann said. “I think about those 252 people, and I’m trying to memorize their names. You know who they are, you know their families, their life situations and what could have been. That’s real motivation. What we need to do is take what happened that day and learn to make the whole warning process better.”
Part of making the warning process better, said Spann, is training meteorologists to integrate social science – the knowledge of human behavior – into their physical science skill set.
“One thing we’ve learned from social scientists is the fact that people don’t do much when they see radar,” Spann said. “They see a bucket of spilled paint. The meteorologists get all excited and they know this is a really dangerous, life-threatening storm, but people see that and they’re like, ‘Yeah, it’s colors.’ But if you can show them a photograph, a video, a live stream of a tornado or some high-impact weather event, they’ll go to a safe place.”
De Block agrees.
“I think one of the biggest challenges is apathy,” De Block said. “Everybody thinks the tornado is something that happens to someone else until it hits your neighborhood.”
De Block said everyone needs to be ready to seek shelter inside an interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building as soon as the NWS receives a weather alert.
“A lot of people in 2011 waited too long,” De Block said. “There were people watching TV reports and then all of a sudden they heard a sound, and when the tornado is moving at 50 or 60 mph, that doesn’t give you much leeway to get from your living room to your safe place. Don’t be apathetic and don’t wait too long to get to your safe place.”
Better Tools
In addition to the weather warning improvements, the tools meteorologists use to forecast severe weather have also improved.
“The most noticeable change is the satellite technology we have,” De Block said. “We used to be lucky to get a good satellite picture every 10-15 minutes. Now we can get them every 30 seconds from a satellite with details that we couldn’t even dream of 10 years ago. That’s a big improvement and a big aid for us to see how those thunderstorms are developing rapidly.”
James Spann said advances in radar technology have greatly improved the ability of meteorologists to detect tornadoes sooner. (contributed)
The NWS has also upgraded its doppler weather radars to include dual-polarization, a feature that allows forecasters to see debris picked up by tornadoes.
“We can actually detect when a tornado has touched down based on the debris that it’s lofting up into the air,” De Block said. “We don’t have to wait for somebody to go out on a backcountry road to tell us there is trees down – that debris signature from the radar is sufficient for us.”
In 2018, Baron created the Baron Critical Weather Institute (BCWI), a nonprofit organization focused on expanding the collection and analysis of real-time weather data in Alabama. Baron said the BCWI is building a statewide mesonet – a weather network, comprised of weather sensors and webcams that can constantly survey the skies across Alabama.
“The one area that we can be of greater assistance in times of significant weather and on a daily basis is to have a better understanding of the boundary level – the level of the atmosphere that is very close to the surface of the Earth,” Baron said. “We have pretty good radar coverage but not at the boundary level. A lot can happen that can give you some hints as to exactly what is going on.”
Baron said the BCWI is working with several government agencies, businesses and media outlets to grow the network.
“I am most gratified by the kind of response that we’ve had to this effort,” Baron said. “The Alabama Emergency Management Agency has been wonderful, as has Alabama Power and the Alabama Department of Transportation. I’m very encouraged that we will have at least one sensor in every county by the end of this year.”
The Future is Smart
Scientists at NWS are developing a program called FACETs, a next-generation severe weather forecast and warning framework. FACETs, which is an acronym for Forecasting a Continuum of Environmental Threats, is designed to communicate clear and simple hazardous weather information to serve the public. Spann said FACETs should reduce the illusion of false alarms caused by old, county-based warning systems.
“We know that’s a big problem – that ‘cry wolf’ syndrome,” Spann said. “Going to storm-based warnings puts only a small part of a county where there’s a real threat in a warning. That’s a really big improvement and we have to do better at teaching people how it works.”
Engineers are also developing a multi-function phased array radar that can perform a complete scan of the sky every 60 seconds, which is more than four times faster than current dual-polarization doppler radars.
“The more data that we can get in and the faster we can get it, the better,” De Block said. “If we got radar updates every minute from the entire volume of the atmosphere, that would be about as good as we could hope for.”
