I thought they were through but now I hear some more. Time to check out weather.com and look at the interactive radar map again. I didn't even know about yesterday's tornado until today.
If I was at Platinum Plus in Columbia, the sirens would likely have to be louder than a jet engine to be heard over the sound system. I think last weekend you wouldn't have been able to hear the jet engine. At least I can still hear.
The town I grew up in used it's big ass air raid siren for two purposes:
1) Curfew 10 p.m. every night, one quaver
2) To summon the volunteer firefighters. Three quavers = brush fire, seven = house fire, ten or more = drop what you're doing, it's really really bad (usually an orange glow in the sky).
I was a volunteer firefighter. In the days before pagers, we got our message from the siren and location from the Police. At night, that siren would send shivers up my spine. It's been a proven fact for nearly 40 years now that a firefighter's blood pressure doubles the moment that he/she gets the call-which is why heart attacks kill more firefighters than anything else.
Haven't heard one in probably 30 years. Where I grew up right outside of DC, we had them, but I seem to remember adults telling me they were also air-raid sirens. It was the height of the Cold War/nuclear threat hysteria in the late 70's/early 80's, and DC was ground zero, so it might have some merit.
I do not get tired of them. They can save lives. I maybe hear it 3 or 4 times a year during the thunderstorm season. The National Weather service radar site for Atlanta is located about 3 miles from me. 2 nights ago a severe thunderstorm went through here. It knocked out power for about 3 hours. No sirens. No hook echos where shown on radar. No substantial damage reported I feel for the small towns and rural dwellers that don't have the protection.
As far as natural disasters go, I think the tornado is the one I'm most afraid of. I lived in Jackson, MS, and I was glad they were serious about keeping the sirens running properly. I'll take a hurricane or a slowly flooding river, any day -- I don't really care about having the exact same property tomorrow that I had yesterday, so any insurance check for replacement cost is fine by me, and with hurricanes and floods you get three days' advance notice to pick up the few sentimentally important things, back up your computer, and drive to Oshkosh. Earthquakes and tornadoes are over, and you're dead, before you knew they were coming.
"2 nights ago a severe thunderstorm went through here. It knocked out power for about 3 hours. No sirens. No hook echos where shown on radar. No substantial damage reported I feel for the small towns and rural dwellers that don't"
Not all severe weather is caused by tornadoes (which sometimes can be seen as "hook echoes" in radar data), and hopefully towns that still have sirens use them for severe thinderstorms warnings as well. The majority of NWS tornado warnings are bogus anyways...either the tornado never happens or it has already happened by the time the warning goes out. That doesn't mean that you should necessarily blow off every warning siren that you hear though...the one that you ignore could be the one that's coming to kill you...
I found out from others that the volume was apparently turned up on the tornado sirens. I can easily hear them inside the house unless I have something loud on now. I live in a large county. It would be nice if they had separate warnings for the northern and southern portions of a large county since we were not in any threat based on what I saw on radar. Winds were calm. The sirens are designed to be heard if you are outdoors. Hopefully things will be calm now. Of course if I had a choice between not hearing them or hearing them, I'd rather hear them. Maybe not 2 nights in a row and twice on the second night. I think part of the problem is doppler radar in the bigger cities indicates some rotation but because of the curvature of the earth and the distance to the bigger cities, they can't tell if we have a tornado or not because they can't see that close to the ground, so we get false alarms.
I never heard any tornado sirens where I used to live at but I did hear the tornado that went over our house. It must have been big to take out the huge trees and it almost got me if it had been just a little bit closer. It snapped off a 3 foot diameter pine right at roof level but our roof was undamaged. The house I lived in then was built apparently with tons of nails to be able to withstand high hurricane winds. I know because I tried to tear off a piece of molding to replace it. It had about 100 to 200 nails in just a foot or two of board. I couldn't believe someone would put that many nails in a board.
The tornado that went over my previous location was shaking my bedroom wall even with that many nails in the wall. Air was getting sucked out of the attic and house at a rapid clip because others heard the sucking sound. We had large vents and almost no insulation in that house. Another time I was at the center of a large supercluster of F5 tornadoes. The lightning was so constant I peeked outside and was temporarily blinded. I had never seen a constant bright light like that so I peeked outside. There were no lightning flashes. It was just on for over 2 or 3 minutes. No tornado sirens heard. It was dead calm at my location but apparently the supercell spanned at least the whole county. I'd rather hear the sirens I guess.
"It would be nice if they had separate warnings for the northern and southern portions of a large county since we were not in any threat based on what I saw on radar."
The NWS already does that...they issue severe weather warnings by posting a "box" around the area that they expect the severe weather potential to be high...not just on which counties might be affected.
"I think part of the problem is doppler radar in the bigger cities indicates some rotation but because of the curvature of the earth and the distance to the bigger cities, they can't tell if we have a tornado or not because they can't see that close to the ground, so we get false alarms."
A lot of tornadic rotation is hard to see because it's usually in the lowest levels of a storm, which a lot of the time is being overshot by the radar beam.
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1) Curfew 10 p.m. every night, one quaver
2) To summon the volunteer firefighters. Three quavers = brush fire, seven = house fire, ten or more = drop what you're doing, it's really really bad (usually an orange glow in the sky).
I was a volunteer firefighter. In the days before pagers, we got our message from the siren and location from the Police. At night, that siren would send shivers up my spine. It's been a proven fact for nearly 40 years now that a firefighter's blood pressure doubles the moment that he/she gets the call-which is why heart attacks kill more firefighters than anything else.
Not all severe weather is caused by tornadoes (which sometimes can be seen as "hook echoes" in radar data), and hopefully towns that still have sirens use them for severe thinderstorms warnings as well. The majority of NWS tornado warnings are bogus anyways...either the tornado never happens or it has already happened by the time the warning goes out. That doesn't mean that you should necessarily blow off every warning siren that you hear though...the one that you ignore could be the one that's coming to kill you...
The NWS already does that...they issue severe weather warnings by posting a "box" around the area that they expect the severe weather potential to be high...not just on which counties might be affected.
"I think part of the problem is doppler radar in the bigger cities indicates some rotation but because of the curvature of the earth and the distance to the bigger cities, they can't tell if we have a tornado or not because they can't see that close to the ground, so we get false alarms."
A lot of tornadic rotation is hard to see because it's usually in the lowest levels of a storm, which a lot of the time is being overshot by the radar beam.