Weather -How to know if tornados are predicted?

The Cliff Notes
It is impossible to predict tornadoes.

However it is possible to predict the conditions that are favorable to the formation of tornadoes.

Sometimes you will get very little (if any) warning.

Twice in my lifetime, I have seen conditions go from "clear blue sky" to thunderstorm with EF2 tornado and back to "clear blue sky" in about 20 minutes.
Luckily we had an underground storm shelter.

First, conditions must be appropriate for a tornado storm to occur. If those conditions are not available, then no storm, no tornado.

Conditions that must be present for storm conditions:

• abundant low-level moisture
• atmospheric instability
• and a "trigger" such as a cold front

Conditions to look for approaching storm with tornado:

• very warm moist conditions
• clouds form with high tops
• a wall cloud forms (a wall cloud is a lowering from a dark cloud - usually black)
• winds grow gradually still
• tornado hits

This means if the air is cool and/or dry - no tornado
If there's an atmospheric cap that "caps" the clouds so they can't grow tall (tall clouds make for more violent storms) - no tornado
No trigger (warm moist air and no cool front) - no tornado
No black or dark clouds (darker cloud, higher cloud, more violent storm) - no tornado.

Those are the things that are common sense - next are how to prepare.
In tornado alley, in the spring, we:

• get our radios, smartphones, apps, emergency supplies, flashlights all geared up with fresh batteries
• know what we're going to do immediately
• know where to go immediately
• we all have our favorite station or weather source

Mine is KOMA in Oklahoma City which live streams Gary England on Channel 9 (KWTV). I have an app on my smartphone where I can stream the radio station whether I have power or not. If you have battery powered TV that's best and tune in to Channel 9. KWTV has an app that is extremely useful (with radar display). This is Oklahoma City specific. Tulsa, Dallas, Amarillo, Kansas City all have their own excellent staff and the point here is to tune in locally.

DO NOT TRY TO OUTRUN A TORNADO. If by chance you are caught in an RV Park, and have 16 minutes notice - go to a shelter - either the center of the bathroom (usually most RV Parks have bathrooms) with a helmet or a specific shelter. If you are in tornado prone area, they will have areas for shelter or even underground shelters. 9 of the people killed in the OKC tornado were pulled from cars who were trying to outrun the storm. This is almost as dangerous as parking in front of the storm and waiting for it to hit you!

Finally, you have to know that the best ability to forecast storms are in the tornado prone areas. They are really very formidable scientists and understand the workings of meteorology very well. Having lived in tornado alley all my life, I would put my life in their hands any day. And tornadoes are very local. These last storms through the OKC metro are not normal (the Pacific is very warm and Atlantic is cold which is causing more severe storms and hurricanes), and these forecasters are very good at being very specific about their locations.

This is a beautiful part of the country and hope your visit is without event. I wouldn't live any place else in the world and chose this area to live in. There are dangerous places throughout the world. At least we know when and where it's coming!

Enjoy your trip through our part of the world.

BTW -- my two favorite RV parks are:
Beavers Bend State Park and Red Rock Canyon State Park OK - and one more Great Salt Plains Lake Area (especially the first two weeks of November when western Oklahoma becomes a major bird migratory channel - we've seen up to 20,000 Sandhill Cranes come through).

Carry a weather alert NOAA radio tuned to the nearest NOAA regional station. A good NOAA radio will sound an alert and give you the most current warning data. You don't have to be reading a screen or looking at your cell phone to hear information that is changing by the second during a bad storm. Cell phone reception is short range and can easily get disrupted, overloaded or you can be out of range crossing the mid-continent.

For warnings (and other information) from the National Weather Service, the tool is a Weather Alert radio, if you are expecting to monitor radio. My RV radio has a band for this, I think many do now. But maybe not the radios in a pickup truck.

Those of us who live in the middle of the country have learned to watch broadcast TV during a storm. More about that later.

Tornadoes predicted? Not sure of your meaning. NWS does not make predictions of tornadoes, but other meteorological sources do try to predict the future locations of known tornadoes, squall lines, and individual storm cells.

When weather (existence of heat energy sources and air instability, combined with moving fronts) is suitable for generating tornadoes (or severe thunderstorms), the NWS will issue a WATCH.

Sometimes there will be a probability associated with that watch. For the storm system last Friday, the WATCH area extended from the southwest corner of Oklahoma to Chicago, and was about 400 miles wide along that line. At least 360,000 square miles of Watch area.

The class of watch was "100% probability of tornadoes being generated somewhere in this area." But the area hit by tornadoes was less than 100th of a percent of the total watch area, so by that measure, probability on the order of 0.0001 for a tornado in any given place. That's about as far as we can go today, predicting tornadoes.

A severe thunderstorm or tornado WARNING is not a prediction. It is a NOTICE that the phenomenon is verified to be actually present, RIGHT NOW, in a particular place.

There is nothing between a WATCH (a forecast) and a WARNING (a sighting) from the NWS. Nothing that serves as a prediction.

The NWS is set up to issue watches and warnings by county. That's not much granularity, where we have counties larger than some eastern states. You should be familiar with that in California, consider the size of Riverside or San Bernardino counties.

Predictions come from elsewhere, if local TV stations have set themselves up to perform that service. They don't predict formation of storms, but they do predict paths of known storms. The source is TV.

Our TV broadcast stations have teams of meteorologists monitoring radars: NWS, their own, and each others'. They are watching storm cell tracks, to predict forward paths of storm movement, speed and direction, arrival times at each community in the path of the storm cell. They are watching rainwater velocities inside the cells, to pick up rotation. The guys an the ground are watching for wall clouds and funnels, reporting existence and movement. They are coordinating their movements with each other, directed by the guys with the radar.

So last Friday, my county was under Tornado Watch from 2 PM to Midnight, and Thunderstorm Watch from 2 PM to 7 AM the next day. It came under Thunderstorm Warning about 5 PM when the first squall lines started rolling through, and continued to have extensions or new Thunderstorm Warnings until about 4 AM.

The county came under Tornado Warning twice during the evening, from 5:45 to 6:45, and a second later tornado approaching a different part of the county 40 miles away extended the Warning for the whole county until 8:15.

On TV, however, I could watch each storm cell approaching from the west, and know whether or not the cell was generating a tornado. I knew the first tornado was crossing the county 16 miles north of my home. I knew the second tornado was crossing the county 8 miles south of my home. I stayed in my storm shelter, TV on, watching each successive wave of storm cells pop up and move across, until we got to the end of the Tornado Watch around mid-night, when the NWS decided that the bodies of unstable air left behind the storm front no longer had sufficient energy to produce tornadic storms.

The TV stations go in this mode not when watches are issued, but when storms first start forming. If it looks really bad, they will stay in full time storm tracking mode until the danger is beyond the TV station's market area. Here, the storms are our news and our entertainment. Reality TV, but without the semi-amateur actors and scripted storylines.

Most of our TV stations have smartphone apps to forward NWS notices as issued, and the higher granularity, more on-time information as it is broadcast, using location services from the phone. These are not so useful traveling, because they are station-specific.

So an least for the really storm intense parts of Tornado Alley (some definitions make that everything between the Rockies and Appalachians), that's how the locals do it. Keep the weather radio on for NWS notices, watch the weather story on TV, real time as it unfolds.

FWIW, for two years I lived in the real Tornado Alley, central Florida. That was long before storm tracking radars that could pick up rotation or work through the different intensity areas inside thunderstorms. We were under Tornado Watch almost half the days for eight months of the year, sometimes from before noon, until almost time to get up in the morning.

Didn't have weather alert radios then in Florida, or the present emergency broadcast system on TV, but information came through local radio and TV stations, which all had live operators and manned newsrooms rather than today's radio station robots. While it was still daylight, we watched the skies. The weather forecasters in the control tower also watched the skies. I saw more tornadoes, two years in central Florida, than I've seen 33 years living in Oklahoma. Partly because we have fewer tornadoes in daylight hours than does Florida, but also because there I was out watching for them to form, here I am inside, letting the TV weather guys do that job for me.

Before I leave I check www.weather.com and look ahead 5 days for severe weather. That way I can change routes if necessary to avoid bad weather. If possible we wait until the weather passes. If not we stay put until it passes and ask where the shelter is at the campground. We have the weather radio from Walmart. Has S.A.M.E. option. About $30. We keep it plugged in and can hear it in our class A. If you are in a truck, you should get a hand held portable weather radio. I'm not sure that a cell phone would work in some areas if you lose signal. Weather channel has an app. Maybe do both. Get the app and a hand held weather radio. Always have a plan.

DH and I live in tornado alley (Oklahoma). We both use smartphone weather apps and a weather map that is installed in our car (if we are traveling). We also have a mobile NOAA weather radio. If you use a smartphone app or the weather radio, they can track your location and send alerts. Just check the weather forecast for the next day when you are traveling and be aware of which county or counties that you will be traveling through. Also, watch the sky--if it is a sickly greenish color, with clouds hanging down (like a kangaroo pouch) or spinning around a large wall cloud, then you should be prepared to take cover if a funnel drops down out of the sky.

Normally our storm season isn't as bad as it had been this year. It started very late and then it just exploded. We know to be aware and we know the signs and how the weather feels when it is going to storm. Just be aware and equip yourself with some weather apps or a weather radio and you will be just fine. The chances are that you won't have any problems at all.

Along in the same line as rockhillmanor in knowing what county you in is dialing 911 from a cell phone...

Sometimes they can tell where you are but if your cellphone service is provided by a large area it can become hard for the 911 operator to know exactly where you are located. Only works good on NCIS or Hawaii Five-O... They may have improved on this now but just a few years back they had problems knowing exactly where you are located unlike when you use a landline phone..

I came up on what appeared to be an abandoned van with the lights on and the motor running with the driver door opened. I called 911 to report the suspicious vehicle and it was right in front of a named church. No one showed up after ten minutes or so so I checked in again to find out they went to the same named church in the next county.

Roy Ken

Takes one minute to google county map of state you are traveling in. Print it out and take with you.

That's what I do now after the first and ONLY time I got caught with a tornado touching down and traveling and I did NOT know if I was traveling away from it or INTO it. Because I did not know what county I was in or what county I was driving towards.

It's a RV'ing learning curve flash for sure. When we are driving in our home towns we 'know' all the counties.

I'll raise my hand that I didn't think about making sure I knew what the name of the counties I was driving through were...until that day I almost died not knowing.

There are several methods, Use of multiple methods is recommended

I have a Weather/All Hazards alert radio, though it has SAME technology (which limits the alerts to the area where I'm parked) I turn it off and put it in TRAVEL mode (All areas the local tower serves are received).

I also use a smart phone with an alert app on it.

I also have VHF radios with external antennas tuned to the weather brueau if needed.

And I have weather spotter training (The last is the least effective but I still recommend it,, after all.. Knowledge is Power.)

mlts22 wrote:
Both iOS and Android have apps that can use your GPS location to warn you about inclement weather. AccuWeather is one example, and HTC's SenseUI 4 also has this.

And the Red Cross has an app called Tornado. The nice feature about using a cell phone over a weather alert radio is that the phone knows exactly where you are while the radio doesn't and requires that you tune it to the proper alert frequency for the area you are in which may not be easy if your travelling. I have both and find the smart phone to be much better but it does require coverage.