KY, TN Take Two Approaches To Extreme Weather Warnings; One Invests In Science, And One Flies Blind
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Tennessee and neighboring Kentucky were hit by the worst of weather extremes in the past year. Before the deadly August downpour that now stands as the largest 24-hour precipitation record in any non-coastal U.S. state, Nashville experienced major flooding that damaged hundreds of homes and businesses, and killed at least six. And in December, tornadoes killed 80 people in Kentucky, the worst death toll from any tornado outbreak in state history.
But there, the similarities end. As scientists increasingly trace the fingerprints of climate change on extreme weather and national weather experts recommend collecting a lot of localized, ground-level weather data in real time to save lives, Kentucky has built an extensive “mesonet,” while Tennessee leaves local forecasters partly flying blind in the storms. The Kentucky Climate Center at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green has, over the last 15 years, assembled a network of 76 local weather monitoring stations—the mesonet—and plans to add up to 20 more stations in the next three years. “The weather service would be lost without the Kentucky Mesonet,” said John Gordon, meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service office in Louisville.
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Tennessee has no statewide network of localized weather monitors. The radar systems they use are very useful, meteorologists say, but Gordon said they track conditions thousands of feet high and can miss what is happening on the ground. So in a state that’s 432 miles long, bordering North Carolina to the east and Arkansas and Missouri to the west, local forecasters are often left to estimate local weather conditions and storm activity where people are at risk.
“I’m sure we’ve missed quite a few high wind, high rain events across the state simply because we don’t have stations in those locations,” said Andrew Joyner, who leads a newly created Tennessee climate office and serves as the state’s official climatologist. One of his goals is to build a Tennessee mesonet with a station in each of the state’s 95 counties. “It’s not cheap to build these stations and then to manage them,” he said. “But we feel like there’s a critical need for it.”
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24022022/battered-and-flooded-by-increasingly-severe-weather-kentucky-and-tennessee-have-a-big-difference-in-forecasting/
