As the president of MISA, I feel compelled to write a post and denounce the actions of the Tornado Intercept Vehicle (TIV), the Discovery Channel support teams, chase tour vans, and other personnel that were caught on tape by Steve Miller’s crew in Oklahoma yesterday.

It’s ridiculous that I’m even talking about this, really… the TIV crew and the Discovery Channel crews, and the paid tornado alley tour groups are professionals. They get paid to do it. So why aren’t they acting professional?

They were caught on tape driving a rural two-lane road, passing on the left. Not just passing on the left, but passing in no-passing zones. Not only were they passing in no-passing zones, but they were driving in the lane of oncoming traffic when they approached the crest of the hill.

This is completely unacceptable. The VORTEX2 operations manual — whether the TIV and/or the Discovery Channel officially abide by it or not — explicitly states that the safety of the research teams and other drivers is certainly more important than getting in place to intercept a tornado.

VORTEX2 will send over 40 vehicles and 100 people to the field, and we will drive about 10,000 miles each season. VORTEX2 will operate and ferry through regions experiencing severe weather including heavy rain, hail, lightning, and high winds, not to mention tornadoes. We will be sharing the roads with numerous other vehicles driven by storm chasers, media, local residents, other travelers, and emergency personnel. Traffic jams will occur, particularly during weekends, near metropolitan areas, and when storms are isolated and/or long lived. Driving ability and confidence varies greatly in sub-ideal weather conditions. Many people who are watching our target storms will be only marginally aware of their surroundings. Therefore, we must be aware of them.

…

To summarize, no tornado, no data set, no arrival time at a hotel is worth injury. Common sense behavior will go a long way towards keeping you and the rest of VORTEX2 safe. If it doesn’t feel safe, dont do it. If it doesn’t feel polite, don’t do it.

While MISA is technically a spotter group and not a chaser group, the public eye doesn’t discern the two. This incident gives both groups a terrible reputation that we are reckless adrenaline junkies.

Storm chasers or spotters are not more important than anyone else on the road. There is such a thing as being too aggressive. Emergency personnel in the area was already dealing with a tornado outbreak — if any of those vehicles passing unsafely had happened to lose control and/or collide with another vehicle, emergency responders would have one more thing to worry about.

VORTEX2 is by far the largest and most ambitious effort ever made to understand tornadoes. We expect over 100 scientists and over 40 science and support vehicles to participate in this unique, fully nomadic, field program during its second and last field season, May/June 2010. The National Science Foundation (NSF) foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are contributing over $10 million towards this effort. Participants will again be drawn from over a dozen universities, and several government and private organizations. International participants will be drawn from Italy, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada and Australia.

The playground for the VORTEX2 project is a wide swath of the central United States, reaching from northern Texas, to northern South Dakota, and over into central Iowa. For the next month and a half, the armada of VORTEX2 mobile labs, trucks, cars, and Doppler on Wheels (DOW) vehicles will be roaming this area to gain a better understanding of how tornadoes form.

If you enjoy listening to storm reports on DMX MICRN or over Skywarn frequencies, then you’ll enjoy listening in on the VORTEX2 frequencies. The organizers of the project felt comfortable enough to be open with the public to publish the project’s operating manual online, which includes the frequency plan for the project. This doesn’t mean it’s ok to interfere with their project in any way, shape, or form. Period.

Because most of these frequencies are simplex (not using a repeater), you’ll probably need to be within a decent range to hear them. The only channel that will be utilized by a repeater is NSSL 2 (165.4375) and that channel will be used to coordinate vehicles.

National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL)
163.1000 – NSSL 1 (Simplex)
165.4375 – NSSL 2 (Duplex)
161.1000 – NSSL 3 (Simplex)

Center for Severe Weather Research (CSWR)/Doppler on Wheels (DOW)
161.5000 – Radar Team Coordination 1
161.4000 – Radar Team Coordination 2
151.9400 – DOW/Telemetry 1
151.8200 – DOW/Telemetry 2
158.4000 – CSWR/DOW

Research teams
161.3000 – Tornado Pod teams 1 – used for DOW to Tornado Intercept Vehicle (TIV) communications
161.2000 – Tornado Pod teams 2
151.7000 – Mobile Mesonet teams 1
151.7600 – Mobile Mesonet teams 2
161.0000 – StickNet teams 1
160.9000 – StickNet teams 2
160.8500 – Unmanned Aerial Surveillance (UAS) Team
160.8000 – Weather balloon teams

I found this gem on YouTube while searching for other Skywarn videos late one night. While the premise and goals of the Skywarn program have remained unchanged, this video from nearly 40 years ago emphasizes how far the science of weather and personal computing has brought the activity.

Instead of chalkboards, meteorologists now use PowerPoint, videos, pictures, and diagrams on a projection screen to teach the general public (read: not meteorology students). Spotters in the field now have laptops, netbooks, aircards, APRS/GPS, and a whole array of wireless technology to assist them in the field and communicate back to the NWS, EOC, or to other spotters.

Since then, scientists have improved the understanding and reliability of weather forecasting. While weather is a science, humans don’t have it “down to a science” quite yet. But I wonder where we’ll be 40 more years from now?

Eerie magenta-tinted clouds cover the community of Parkersburg, Iowa, after a tornado demolished the southern third of the town on Sunday, May 25, 2008. (Kevin Sanders/AP)

It was Sunday, May 25, 2008 — the day before Memorial Day — when I was on my way back home from the campus of Iowa State University when I got the call.

“There’s been a tornado in northeast Iowa. A pretty big one,” the Associated Press staffer told me on the telephone. As a photo stringer for the AP Des Moines bureau, I had become accustomed to being sent into areas around the state that had just been hit by a tornado. It wasn’t uncommon to do two or three of these assignments each year.

I hung up the phone and started getting my gear together immediately. I got my cameras and lenses together and packed an extra change of clothes. I hopped on the computer and googled where the town of Parkersburg was and how long it would take to get there.

Thinking this would be a routine tornado assignment, I went out the door in about 15 minutes and jumped on Interstate 35 and headed north towards US Highway 20. Once on US Highway 20 near Steamboat Rock, I saw towering stormclouds due east. As I got closer and closer to Parkersburg, I was encountering entire convoys of electric utility contractor trucks and trucks hauling heavy equipment.

As the sun went down and twilight set in, I left Highway 20 and got on Iowa Highway 14, the final leg to Parkersburg. Already, the road and ditches were lined with debris and downed electric poles. Another line of storms had moved in and began dumping heavy rain and nickel-sized hail. The conditions were so poor that it forced me to stop and pull over onto the shoulder halfway down the road from Parkersburg.

After the rain let up, I continued further north on Highway 14. I approached the state trooper blocking the road into Parkersburg, identified myself, and he let me pass. I took a left onto Iowa Highway 57, the main southernmost road in Parkersburg. I stopped a few blocks down and parked the car, gathered up my equipment out of the backseat and continued on foot.

As I stopped to take a look around me and size up the situation, I couldn’t help but be a little spooked by the silhouettes of splintered, barren trees and collapsed buildings against the magenta-tinted sky. It was truly an unforgettable feeling that still puts pits in my stomach to this day.

A firefighter searches what's left of homes and businesses for victims. (Kevin Sanders/AP)

The entire southern half of Parkersburg had been evacuated, and only first responders were in the area. Police and firefighters were still searching the collapsed structures for any survivors or victims. Heavy machinery and generators were the only things that could be heard in the background. As the daylight quickly gave way to darkness, I had only seen one section of the destruction before I determined it was too dark to work safely. I left Parkersburg that night to crash at Matthew’s house, a friend that worked at the Waterloo Courier as a photographer, who was also covering the disaster.

What I saw that night in Parkersburg — trees stripped bare, pieces of lumber that were lodged in anything and everything after being projectiles in the storm, houses wiped clean off their foundations — was only a small part of the picture and I underestimated the magnitude of the destruction as darkness obscured the disaster area.

The next day — Memorial Day — Matthew and I woke up early and headed out. Matthew went to a neighboring town of Parkersburg, New Hartford, and I went straight to Parkersburg. When I arrived, Iowa Homeland Security was keeping the media out of the area while residents return to their homes to salvage items. Iowa HSEMD’s handling of the media that day is not routine for disaster areas, and it was frustrating for all of us.

Not wasting any time, I began calling around to private aviation contractors in the area to go up and do aerial photos of the town in mourning. Everyone in the area was closed for Memorial Day. Finally, I got lucky with a company I had worked with out of the Ankeny airport near Des Moines when a pilot answered the phone and said he could be in the air in 20 minutes. I arranged for him to meet me at the Waterloo Airport, about a half hour drive for me from Parkersburg.

When I arrived at the Waterloo Airport, I discovered that they were actually clipped by the very same tornado. The airport had minimal damage but no electricity, and no fuel pumps. Thankfully, my plane was able to land and pick me up. We received permission to fly above the no-fly zone that was established around Parkersburg. Less than 5 minutes after landing, we were back in the air and heading west towards Parkersburg.

When we got into the air, the big picture finally became visible. It was impossible to see the magnitude of destruction from the ground. From the air you could certainly see the path that the tornado took. Homes, businesses, trees, and everything else that was upright before the storm was spread out for miles.

A day after the tornado hit, the tornado's path could clearly be seen from the air, looking from the southeast of Parkersburg, Iowa on Monday, May 26, 2008. (Kevin Sanders/AP)

We spent about 20 minutes in the air, shooting at various focal lengths and angles, before returning to the Waterloo Airport. I sat in the lobby of the hangar and edited then filed the pictures before heading back to Parkersburg.

When I arrived back in Parkersburg, the HSEMD lackeys went home and let the media have some elbow room to work on their reports. When I got back in town, people wanted to tell their stories to anyone that wanted to listen.

They told stories about their experience when the tornado passed over the house they have lived in the entire lives, they talked about their faith in God, talked about what they called a near-death experience, told me about how their houses collapsed inwards and fell into the basements and told me what they were praying for as they were in their basements.

But every single resident told me how fortunate they felt that they had early warning for the storm. While still a significant number, only six people died immediately from the EF-5 Parkersburg-New Hartford-Dunkerton tornado and left 70 injuries in its path of destruction.

A resident surveys tornado damage in Parkersburg, Iowa on Monday, May 26, 2008. (Kevin Sanders/AP)

Thanks to Doppler technology and ground-truth spotting, the lead time on the warning was substantial. What would have been the number of fatalities if the National Weather Service couldn’t use these tools to their advantage?

At 4:22 p.m., the first tornado warning went out for the storm. The warning included the cities of Aplington and Parkersburg. The next statement came at 4:46 p.m., warning that the tornado will be near Parkersburg at 5 p.m.

At 4:59 p.m., the tornado started cutting a swath of destruction through the southern half of Parkersburg. Residents had 37 minutes of warning. The tornado continued until just before the Buchanan County line at 5:58 p.m.

Amateur radio was one of the first outside entities to enter Parkersburg. A tornado was first reported as it developed east of Ackley by amateur radio at 4:47 p.m. and the first reports of damage in Parkersburg came into the National Weather Service via amateur radio at 5:01 p.m.

These are the points that I like to tout when I get asked “is amateur radio still relevant?” and if we really need storm spotters out there with modern technology and more high-tech forms of communication.

That fall in 2008, I went and tested for my amateur radio license at Iowa State University on a whim. And I passed. When I was a kid playing with scanners listening to the storm spotters, this was something I wanted to do. In a sense, I think this is something that I felt I had to do for others.

My experience in Parkersburg and other disaster zones I have worked in as a photojournalist has given me a call to serve. I’ve been back to Parkersburg a few times since the tornado hit, and every time I enter the town from the south on Highway 14, when I get to the top of the hill I just get this pit in my stomach, my palms begin to sweat, and everything just comes back to me. My mind replays the image of pulling up into the town in the heavy rain with barren trees and building rubble silhouetted against an oddly pink-colored sky. It’s a feeling like none other.

Not only have I bolstered my emergency preparedness at home, but I now proactively use amateur radio and the latest technology to spot storms, and as cliche as it may sound, but to also keep others safe through the benefit of advance warning. The Parkersburg disaster emphasized the importance of amateur radio’s role in the process of issuing severe weather warnings.

After being elected last month as the president of the Mid-Iowa Skywarn Association, I’ve been working on enhancing the organization to be more connected with spotters and the general public. It’s not a position for me to take lightly, and I take great pride in what I’ve been tasked with. This is only the beginning.

This, of course, meant that there would be new blood coming into those various leadership positions. I am pleased to announce that I was elected through a close write-in vote to serve as the next president of Mid-Iowa Skywarn, which is effective immediately. I am grateful to be elected to this position, and I do indeed have some big shoes to fill and expectations to exceed. I learned this evening that Jim and I have very similar reasons for joining Skywarn, which I will likely write about later down the road. I plan on hitting the ground running, and I have plans to act on. Tom N0VPR was also elected to the role of secretary/treasurer — Tom has been working with Skywarn and ARES for quite a while as well, and we have worked with each other as president/vice president for the local club.

The Mid-Iowa Skywarn Association is the organization that mans the amateur radio station in the Des Moines National Weather Service office, using call sign K0DMX. It takes storm reports from all corners of the NWS Des Moines’ 51-county warning area through an extensive VHF/UHF linked repeater network. We’re lucky to have a great relationship with the Des Moines meteorologist-in-charge and warning coordinator.

After the brief meeting, we moved on to our annual two-hour spotter training class presented by the NWS. It was a great presentation, I thought. It included some new pictures and videos. It was certainly a good crowd, probably more than last year. If maybe a half-dozen more people showed up, we would have run out of seats. A lot of new faces I haven’t seen around — either they are hams that don’t usually come to our “normal” club meetings or this was their first time attending a storm spotter course.

Tom set out some amateur radio information brochures and fliers, along with business cards that listed information about the DMRAA and its meetings. After the presentation, non-hams were mingling with the hams asking how to get involved in amateur radio, and most of those business cards were gone, so I’d say the training session also sparked some interest in amateur radio. It turned out pretty well.

The section of the structure that suffered damage was just recently taken down, and the club produced a time-lapse video of the process on what appears to be a very cold day on the frozen tundra of Dickinson County. It looked like quite a process, and I’m sure the weather made it much more difficult. Thank you, W0DOG, for braving the elements to set the repair process in motion for .61!

But that’s just what happened during the recent blizzard: they handled 3,725 calls for help, the Des Moines Register reports. That’s more than double the average of 766 calls a day.

While the only time I ever hear dispatchers from the Iowa State Patrol is when they’re communicating with the executive protection branch at the Iowa capitol. But I’m sure it made for some great listening on LEA and car-to-car, along the same lines of Highway Helper and the DOT snow plow crews. I’m sure they had many colorful ways of describing those unskilled drivers that didn’t heed the “travel not advised” warnings…

Those same systems will probably make for some good listening this week, as holiday travelers will be fighting rain, freezing rain, sleet, and possibly a foot or snow on top of all that. Let’s hope people have wised up this go-round.

So, in the past five years I’ve never had a problem with those people in the brown outfits. Usually on time — never early — but usually on time. I prefer to ship via US Postal Service, for various reasons, including the fact that our regular mailmen have the code to my apartment building, which is access-controlled by a keypad at the entrance. He knows each building, and where each apartment is. No big deal. UPS usually has the code too, but there’s been a couple instances where we had a new driver that didn’t have the code and we had to go pick it up at the UPS hub at East Hull and Delaware in Des Moines. No big deal.

But in the past few weeks, I’ve had nothing but nearly-catastrophic problems with UPS. It all began with Death Storm 2009, a blizzard that had its sights set on Des Moines last week. I was supposed to receive a package from Hamcity full of cables, connectors, tools, and a power supply. I usually watch all shipments’ movements very carefully online, so I know when to expect it to be on my doorstep. This was no exception.

The shipment was scheduled to arrive on December 10, so imagine my excitement when I logged into My UPS on December 8 to find out that the status was updated to show that it was actually ahead of schedule with an updated delivery date of December 9. Could it have been true? Every time my package is ahead of schedule, they hold it anyways — but maybe, I thought, they were trying to get packages out before the blizzard hit.

It arrived at the Des Moines hub on December 9, as promised, and went out for delivery that morning. Later that afternoon, a grim status showed up: “ADVERSE WEATHER CONDITIONS / THE MOVEMENT OF THE PACKAGE WILL RESUME AS SOON AS THE WEATHER CONDITIONS ALLOW.”

The snowpocalypse was here. So was my mailman, as usual, and my next door neighbor even received a package from UPS that day. But nothing for me.

The package stayed on the truck for the rest of the day until UPS apparently gave in and re-scanned the package the next day and updated it to a status of “EMERGENCY CONDITIONS BEYOND UPS’ CONTROL.” That’s ok, I thought. Most of central Iowa was snowed in (but my mailman wasn’t). I can’t really blame them for not wanting to put their goods and employees at risk. By the end of the day, the worst was over and snow plows were starting to get an edge over the snow. I thought for sure they’d deliver on Friday, the next day.

We were greeted on Friday with blue skies, no wind, and totally clear roads. Unfortunately, I was greeted again with “EMERGENCY CONDITIONS BEYOND UPS’ CONTROL” even though I easily made a 30-mile-round-trip run to the weekly ham radio luncheon in my little sedan with ease.

The complete history of my package's journey through the snowpocalypse. Except for what actually happened. Click image to enlarge

I hung up the phone. I called back. Kept pounding zero until I finally got to a representative. The agent, obviously reading a prepared script and ingenuinely apologizing for the delay, told me the package won’t be delivered until Monday. “Monday? Are you sure it’ll get to me by Monday?” I asked. “Well, I, uh, no, I can’t really guarantee that,” he replied.

UPS: Crashing and burning since 1907

I lost confidence in UPS at that very moment. What happened to the idea of customer service? Even though I paid for UPS to deliver to my door, I made the 17-mile round trip to their hub to make sure I got the package in Monday because UPS was showing incompetence by Friday, and they weren’t confident that I would get the package on Monday. I finally had the package in my hands Monday evening, and all was well.

Until the next week rolled around and I had three more packages to arrive on my doorstep via UPS.

Two boxes of split loom from Amazon.com and a box containing an antenna (which had been backordered for weeks) and mount from Universal radio was expected to arrive Tuesday, December 15. All three boxes arrived at the Des Moines hub shortly after midnight and were put on the trucks for delivery around 5 a.m.

Here we are shortly before midnight, where Wednesday the 16th is about to turn into Thursday the 17th. The packages have all been showing “out for delivery” for more than 40 hours now, and haven’t been heard since. No adverse weather here, nothing but blue skies since the blizzard cleared out a week ago. Clear roads. They’re not blaming it on the weather or anything, the status just isn’t being updated. I understand it’s the holiday season and everything, but the seasonal shipment volume shouldn’t be a surprise to them — they know what they’ll need to be on time during such a busy time of the year, so there really is no excuse.

Last night, I thought maybe the driver was just going to be working late. He’ll be here by 7 p.m. — maybe 8 — and then maybe 9 — alright, maybe he’s working really late — maybe 10? Tuesday turned into Wednesday and nothing was seen.

I decided with last week’s package problems, 8 p.m. will be my deadline before I call UPS… again. Eight o’clock came, and at 8:05 I was on the phone with another agent. She told me nothing more than the tracking number has already told me — it’s somewhere, and it hasn’t been re-scanned for a really, really long time.

“Once it gets re-scanned, we’ll know where it’s at,” the agent said. “Alright, uh, well, so nobody knows where it’s at?” I asked. “Nope, but rest assured that we’ll know where it’s at when it gets scanned again.”

“What if it never gets scanned again?” I asked in a somewhat tense voice. “You should probably call Universal Radio and Amazon and have them call us to put a trace on it,” she recommended.

Again, UPS customer service has failed me. I can’t even file a claim or request an investigation myself — I have to call the vendor and have them call UPS to request a trace. With Universal, it shouldn’t be so bad — but I’m having a hell of a time trying to find where I can do such a thing for Amazon.com.

This has definitely marred my perception of UPS. Any vendor that ships exclusively with UPS from now on will be a vendor of last resort.

Team K0DMX - NWS Des Moines - after sunrise

Field Day and SRD are the only times I really get to work on HF for several varying reasons. Not to mention it’s a very laid-back event, not really as competitive as Field Day (although we do log QSO’s… and Des Moines has been at the top for the past few years), and it gives me a reason to stay up all night.

When I got to the office, George KK7FM and Shane N0ZXJ were still there. Eventually they both left, as George was tired and Shane had already worked a full day at the NWS on Friday. We kept at least two operators on the rigs at all times. While I was there, 80m seemed to be the only open band and for quite a while the only ones on the band were stations we already worked.

Most of the chatter was about the cold weather all around. It hovered around 14-18 degrees most of the night, but there was one sub-zero station in northern Minnesota and a decently balmy station in Florida. It had just snowed in several parts of the southwest as well.

Right around 5 or 6 a.m., new operators on the east coast started waking up and spinning the dials, getting ready to check into nets. Before activity started to pick up, I plopped myself down on 3.850.00 and called CQ. At 7 a.m. I had a deluge of stations calling me on that frequency. I worked about 200 stations on that frequency within about three and a half hours, including both coasts and some Canadian stations. It was a good feeling. Of course I had the sporadic bursts of smartasses interrupting and asking in several rude ways what the hell kind of contest “Skywarn” is without identifying themselves, but it was overall a fun experience.

I ended up leaving to go back home around 10 a.m. — I planned to stay longer than 8 hours, but my ability to form coherent, non-rambling sentences together was quickly deteriorating and so it was time to step away from the mic.

Next year I hope to have D-STAR capabilities for SRD, and I hope that NWS advertises a reflector number on the website and lists NWS offices that will be using D-STAR for the event (like they do already for Echolink/IRLP). I also thought about setting up a live video stream like NWS Detroit K8DTX did — they seemed pretty popular and heard a few comments over the air about their stream.