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I have to confess that I was a little disappointed when the blustery gray wind of April 28 fizzled out into nothing. No thunder. No sickly colored skies. Not really even much in the way of rain. I know I’m not alone in that feeling. If there’s one thing Minnesotans love more than talking about the weather, it’s talking about the weather that didn’t happen.
But you should know that the meteorologists are not our allies here. “What got most meteorologists into the business wasn’t ‘oh wow,’ it was ‘holy crap,’ ” said Paul Douglas, meteorologist and weather columnist for the Minnesota Star Tribune. They often take up the interest because they survived a severe weather event themselves. They aren’t disappointed when a storm doesn’t hit the Twin Cities. They’re relieved. They know a tornado that could have happened, and didn’t, isn’t necessarily a forecasting error (or a simple bummer) — it’s damn good luck.
The Twin Cities area hasn’t always been so lucky. On May 6, 1965, six tornadoes ripped through the northwest part of the region, from Chanhassen to Minneapolis and on into Fridley. Four of them were retroactively determined to be severe F-4 storms. (The Fujita scale classifying tornadoes was introduced in 1971.) In fact, Fridley was hit by two distinct F-4 tornadoes in the same night. It was a horrific disaster. But it’s also remembered as the first time that our civil defense air raid sirens were repurposed into tornado alarms. Between that terrible night and our recent terribly boring one, the systems for predicting and alerting people about severe weather have drastically improved. But while the technology has advanced, said Kenneth Blumenfeld, senior climatologist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, “It’s unclear if the population is better prepared than they were decades ago.”
Sixty years ago, meteorologists had already begun to make predictions that gave people a 24-hour advance warning about likely storm conditions, said Mark Seeley, professor emeritus and extension climatologist with the University of Minnesota. Those predictions, like the ones that exist now, were based on a combination of weather observations and computer analysis. But around 2001, the power and detail of both those things rapidly increased. That doesn’t mean the predictions are always accurate. But it does mean we can see more things happening in the atmosphere, in more detail. Even 30 years ago or so, Blumenfeld told me, a prediction of rain would have to be applied to several Minnesota counties at once. You couldn’t narrow the location down more than that. Today, he said, some of the forecast models show what the radar could look like, with rain in one St. Paul neighborhood, say, but not in others.
Seeley attributes some of this advancement to improved real-time weather observations from balloons that go up twice a day from the National Weather Service in Chanhassen — and all over the world. These balloons can collect more data, at more levels of the atmosphere, than they could in the past.
Meanwhile, the algorithms that data is fed into also exploded in number and became much more powerful. Meteorology is an applied physical science, Blumenfeld said. The atmosphere runs on physics. But while the math of this was well known back in 1965, no one could do enough calculations, fast enough, to really get a clear picture of what was likely to happen over long periods of time and specific locations. Today, at least 100 different models ingest data from all over the world and combine it with atmospheric physics. Every time the algorithms play out a possible scenario, they run quadrillions of equations. Some models run 24 times each day. When those diverse models begin to produce similar possible futures, everyone pays attention.
