Storm-chasing veteran Warren Faidley, with 20 years of experience and appearances on Nova, PBS, and CNN, explains how a rare 98-mph windstorm in Prump (Nevada) and surrounding areas—unprecedented even for desert residents—stemmed from an intense low-pressure system. He debunks tornado "electric motor" theories, noting only 50-60% of their mechanics are understood, while detailing the chaos of hail storms like the June 1993 "hell storm" in Kansas that shattered his windshield. Faidley warns of misidentified vortices (gustnadoes vs. tornadoes) and emphasizes safety, education, and the unpredictability of severe weather despite advanced tools like Doppler radar, even as he prepares for Minnesota’s high-risk Tuesday. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in the Great American Southwest, the very strange Great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good afternoon, good morning, wherever in the world you are listening to us in the moment.
I'm 40 on the dial there, and the GM is Mike Simpson.
Glad to have you on board the network as we continue to grow and grow and grow and grow and grow and grow.
All right, I do have a serious story to tell you about, and I'd like to add that for that purpose, I'm going to be holding the first-time caller line open for only people here in the Prump area, the southern Nevada area, in general, and that is area code 775-727-1222.
So if everybody else would please not dial that number for a while here, that's the 727-1222 number only for the Perump, southern Nevada area.
Now, I'll briefly cover what's going on in the world, which is never too pretty.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharone said Monday that Israeli troops would press ahead with a campaign against Palestinian militants in Ramallah and Bethlehem, despite U.S. pleas to get out.
Secretary of State Colin Powell on Monday embraced the idea of an international conference aimed at stopping Middle East violence and restarting Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, sidestepping a clash with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who wants to exclude Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from any such conference.
Before moving on, well, here's an interesting one from Racine Wisconsin Art.
I can't believe the weather we're having here in southern Wisconsin.
We didn't have a winter at all.
It snowed twice this winter, a maximum accumulation that we normally get in, say, a month.
Today, it hit 90 and is forecast for 90 tomorrow, too.
All of my bulb plants are in bloom, which normally doesn't occur until May.
What's even more odd is that I've lived here all my life, and as a kid, I remember bitter cold winters.
It lasted six months.
But over the last 10 years, our winters have gotten less severe.
Our springs have come earlier now.
We hardly ever see zero degrees anymore.
This year, it only hit it one day.
I would never have believed in global warming or climate change or whatever this drastic.
But I can no longer deny that something is definitely changing and rapidly.
I certainly agree with that.
Now, let me tell you what happened here.
Yesterday, I began receiving weather reports indicating there was a giant pressure gradient difference developing here in the west.
And we had very hot weather.
We were touching 100 degrees during the day and only going down into the 80s at night.
Right now, the temperature is 55.9 degrees.
Now, we went down approximately 30 degrees in both daytime and nighttime temperature in a period of three hours.
We were getting warnings yesterday that we were going to get winds here, perhaps in excess, gusting in excess of 60 miles per hour.
You know, a lot of times when you hear these warnings and it turns out to be 30 or 40, but not 60 today, and we were very concerned, so Ramona and myself went to the radio station yesterday afternoon and then again last night during George's program, and we tried to warn everybody.
We told them what we saw coming and said they had better batten down the hatches.
Well, let me tell you.
Beginning about mid-morning and beginning to get severe at about noon, in all the years I've lived in the desert, and we get big winds in the desert, you know, we're used to them.
I have never seen anything like this.
Now, I cannot be sure.
All I can tell you is I looked over at my Davis weather station.
I was at KNYE, of course.
Both Ramona and myself went down when this began, and I looked over.
We were almost always in excess of 60 miles an hour.
We were frequently in excess of 70 miles an hour, and it hit 84 miles per hour.
Now, there is a significant amount of damage to our town, quite a bit of damage.
There are obviously fences down.
Buildings have blown over.
Several houses have self-destructed.
They're nothing more than a sort of pieces of small pieces of matchbox right now.
We really, really got slammed.
It was a very frightening experience for all concerned.
And what we did was go down to our local station, PNYE, and get on the air and begin talking with people.
And we got on the air and began talking with local residents, taking reports of damage.
It was so bad they didn't let the children out of school at the appointed time.
Las Vegas also caught hell.
But it's my understanding it wasn't quite as bad as what we got.
McCarran International Airport was closed.
The desert was a screaming mess.
And all over town, there are downed power lines, there are downed trees.
And by the way, a lot of people have trees over their homes right now.
You're going to want to get that taken care of rapidly as there is more wind in the forecast for Wednesday.
It was a very harrowing day.
Now, it's kind of interesting because I've got tonight's guest in the next hour is going to be a storm chaser of all things.
Warren Fatley is going to be here.
He's a professional storm chaser and we'll have a lot to talk about because I used to do that.
But what we had today.
Oh my God.
What we had today was incredible.
It was beyond all belief.
I'm telling you, it was just any cars that were out got a new paint job, or at least we'll have one.
They were sandblasted.
Our neighbor, here at the house, our neighbor, not that we were at the house, we stayed at the radio station and dutifully talked to people.
But when we got home, we discovered our neighbor's roof has a very large section of it gone.
And he needs to be notified of that fact.
So if you're out there, bud, you need to check in.
Portion of your roof there at the top is missing and not just tiles.
You know, these very special tiles, but down to where you can see the insulation, and that's an obvious danger either for more wind or for any moisture.
A lot of people in very serious trouble here.
A lot of people lost a lot of possessions here in the desert today.
It was awful.
It was absolutely awful.
And if you can think of 70 and 80 mile an hour winds, that went on for three solid hours.
To a lesser degree, for probably all day until the sun finally went down.
But all day long.
And then for three hours, there was nothing but sheer terror.
When you have 70 to 84 mile-an-hour winds, it's sheer terror.
You have no idea what's coming down or what's probably going to come down.
So I am going to restrict the first time caller line to people in Parump or the Southern California area that experienced this today.
There is no doubt our weather is in the midst of a serious change and it is going to become more violent and stranger very, very quickly.
That would seem apparent.
I think George had a guest last night about a new ice age, the possibility of a new ice age.
Well, that may be, or it may be global.
You know, who knows?
The only thing obvious out of it, while the scientists argue, is that there is a massive, massive change underway.
And we got a taste of it here today.
Whether the jet stream, of course, was over us or near us, it may have actually come down and touched down.
Who knows?
I have never in my life seen sustained winds like that here in the desert, and that would include about my short 15 years experience here in Perump, Nevada.
Nothing like this has ever happened before.
And I inquired of many, many local residents as I talked to them through the day.
It was pretty scary if anybody had ever seen anything this bad before.
Uniformly, they said, absolutely not.
Well, all right, here we go.
And again, I want to remind my audience that I'm just holding this first-time caller line open for people in the local area who experienced what I just told you about.
You just can't imagine the damage around the valley, down trees, down power lines, homes destroyed or very heavily damaged, others not as heavily damaged.
But if you get an antenna, in fact, I've been told if you get a, you know, like a beam antenna and you point it from there, or even that matter, parts of Las Vegas, you'll get us just fine.
unidentified
Yeah, I was wondering about one of them CC antennas.
Incidentally, there is, I think you're going to be real surprised about this.
There's a new squid.
I mean, this is a really big squid.
I've got a link up on the website right now.
It says a new type of large squid reaching up to 23 feet, that's 7 meters long, has Been spotted in the deep waters of several ocean basins, including rather, according to a report published in the December 21st, 2001 issue of Journal Science, the open ocean covers more than two-thirds of the Earth's surface, yet scientists know very little about its inhabitants.
In fact, the squids were seen eight times within a few years at similar depths in the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic, the Indian, and Pacific Oceans.
That indicates how little we must know about life in the Earth's largest ecosystem.
Now, there are two videos available.
There's one still photograph of this squid.
So it's not as though we're telling you stories here.
Go to my website, artbell.com, click on what's new.
Go in the up direction instead of down.
You'll see updated news and other websites.
You click on that.
And then new giant deep sea squid.
Click on that.
And they've got some videos of it and still photographs.
And it's absolutely astounding.
I mean, this thing is an absolute monster.
That's all you can say about it.
It is a sea monster.
So go take a look at a sea monster if you would like.
I think you'll find it just an amazing sight that that's in our ocean, and we had no idea that it was.
Okay, let me clear that line, and let's go here for a second.
That's normal for the desert, but 84 miles an hour is not.
unidentified
Well, we've had it before since I've been here, so it's not that often.
But my point tonight, what I was calling about, was if we want to utilize wind power, we shouldn't be doing it by simply putting a bunch of little turbines all over the land.
Where the wind is, is up in the atmosphere.
And if some of it's down here occasionally, well, that's all right, but that's not going to do us any good.
What can happen is that the, I appreciate the call, what can happen is that the jet stream can dip down.
And if you'll look at the position, excuse me, of the jet stream a little earlier today, you'll see it was right over us.
Now, did that contribute to it?
I don't know.
I'm not a meteorologist, and I really can't.
I guess, you know, might be able to answer it for all I know, but the jet stream was over us.
I know there was a giant pressure gradient difference, and obviously when you have a clash of that kind of cold and hot air, you're going to get serious trouble, and that's what we had here today was very, very serious trouble.
I mean, once you can no longer see your hood, you can't see whether anybody's behind you, in front of you, coming toward you, or for that matter, you can't see, obviously, you can't even see if you've got a shoulder on which to drive off on.
So when you get to true zero visibility, the only thing you can really do is to come to a slow stop and hope to God that people behind you are doing the same thing.
Because otherwise, you're going to run into something.
So there's very little choice.
When you actually get to complete zero visibility, there's doggone little choice.
You do what you have to do, and that's kind of come to a crawl right on the road and pray.
In fact, it was a kind of day around here where that's what you did for most of the day.
You prayed.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
Just raging at you from the high desert, which has been raging with wind today.
unidentified
incredible I've got to ride by like a wind to be free again.
And I've got something long way to go.
Up the boat, we're doing to go.
Up the boat, we're doing to go.
Up the boat, we're doing to go.
Up the boat, we're doing to go.
Rechard Bell in the Kingdom of Nye.
From west of the Rockies, dial 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
First-time callers may rechart at 1-775-727-1222 or use the wildcard line at 1-775-727-1295.
To rechart on the toll-free international line, call your AT ⁇ T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell on the Premier Radio Networks.
Well, Art, we'll be back in a few moments.
Hello, I'm Ramona Bell, bringing you a short report from our friends over at the Alamo Ranch who wanted to let us know that one of the ham operators here in town near Charleston Park and Warren lost half of their ham tower and also has a weather station that clocked a wind speed of 98 miles an hour.
Now that is the scariest drive that I ever took leaving the house this afternoon, pretty close to noon, driving right over to the station and having to stop twice on our way over there because the sand and dust was so bad that it literally just blacked out the road around us.
And the scary part was not the stopping.
The scary part is the oncoming traffic that did not stop and decided that they were going to outrace the wind.
So that's my small pet peeve right now.
There were loose horses out and about.
And thank you very much people who were out there trying to round them up for folks who might not have been home at the time or may not have been physically able to go on out and to round their animals up.
So, you know, small bone to pick with you folks out there who wanted to outrace this storm.
And I have a pole barn with a steel roof and a steel frame, and it picked the entire thing up off the roof off the pole barn and laid it over in the neighbor's yard.
But in the process of doing so, it took the power lines down.
Yeah, I understand they closed the Mercury test site.
unidentified
Yeah, they closed it all down.
She runs the whole recreation area up there, and they sent all the kids home from school.
And then out here in Vegas, there was a truck that turned over with a bunch of acid and a hazardous material in it, and they had to shut down the freeways.
It was a first item out, and long stories on all the local news.
I really appreciate your call, sir.
Thank you.
It was bad in Las Vegas, but it was significantly worse here.
I think our winds here were an easy 30 miles an hour better and probably lessened a little as it went over the mountain, but I understand it was also very, very bad in Las Vegas.
On the first time, caller line, you're on the air.
But boy, I'll tell you, when it got off into the high desert, you know, when it started rising up into the high desert, which is where we are, it was unbelievable.
So we're undergoing some sort of change, a change in which not just the kind of weather you're hearing that I had here today, that we had here, but whether that's going to be different everywhere in some places perhaps that are normally violent, it will not be as violent.
That's also one possibility.
As a matter of fact, we've got a storm chaser coming on.
All right, that's what happened today in the West, folks.
We had one hell of a day.
From the High Desert, I'm Mark Belt.
Storm Chaser is coming up next.
What a show that'll be.
unidentified
I've been where the eagle flies, rode his wings cross all the skies, kissed the sun, touched the moon, but he left me much too soon, his ladybird.
He left his ladybird.
Ladybird, come down.
I'm here waiting on the ground.
Ladybird, I'll treat you good.
Ah, Lady Bird, I wish you would you, Lady Bird, pretty ladybird.
Lightning moment You are all the woman I need, and baby, you know me, low.
She said that I'd kill you a kind of a fool, baby I'll give you all that I want You got the baby in your life, you got the gold Leave me somewhere Make me shake like any way you want me Love me, you love me, it's alright
Call our bell in the Kingdom of Nye from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
First-time callers may rechart at 1-775-727-1222.
And the wildcard line is open at 1-775-727-1295.
To rechart on the toll-free international line, call your AT ⁇ T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of God.
Reading my past blast, I'm seeing a path of destruction from Utah on down, and apparently it was really, really awful in Utah as well.
Salt Lake City posted the lowest barometric pressure today, and they had a 12-car pileup there.
Winds, they claim, up to 100 and over 100 miles an hour.
Incredible.
Coming up, this is kind of an interesting segue.
Warren Fadley is a photojournalist and cinematographer who specializes in extreme weather and natural disasters.
I don't mean to laugh here.
It's just what we went through.
He is the only journalist storm chaser in the world who covers natural disasters as a full-time, year-round profession.
Should have been here today.
Over the last 15 years, Warren has traveled across thousands of miles, covering 15 states.
His travels have been filled with moments of wonder, beauty, oftentimes shadowed by terrifying encounters and personal sacrifice.
His breathtaking images of graphic and sometimes violent events are seen in books, advertisements, magazines, public safety publications like Life, National Geographic, Scientific American, Newsweek Time, USA Today, and more.
He's a frequent guest speaker at universities, corporate events, and safety educational functions.
Often serves as a severe weather and disaster consultant on television and radio programs like MSNBC and CNN.
Warren has appeared on many TV shows and in magazines, including Nova, PBS, the History Channel, Discovery, Weather Channel, CBS, NBC, ABC News, the BBC.
Oh my, it goes on and on.
National Geographic Explorer, Eye to Eye, with Connie Chung, Maury Povich, Tom Snyder, Fox News, Real TV, and the Emmy Award-winning show Front Runners.
He was recently a contestant.
On to tell the truth.
No kidding.
He is a consultant for the motion picture industry.
He was one of the initial consultants for Twister.
Oh, yes, Twister.
One of Warren's tornado images was used for the movie poster and product line.
Oh, really?
His diverse film and video credits include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Huff Daddy, Paul McCartney, MTV Jurassic Park, Michael Jordan, a variety of television commercials for clients like NASCAR, the NFL, NBA, GMC, and Turner Broadcasting.
Well, that's a good question because you almost have to be there with weather.
You know, breaking news, you can go to a scene.
You either get there too early or too late or at the right time, and then you get the shot.
With weather generally requires a little bit of pre-planning.
For example, you were talking about Amarillo.
In about two weeks, I take off and meet some of my chase volunteers in Amarillo, and we'll chase from that location through the rest of the spring into mid or late June.
Now, I heard an interesting stat on CNN the other day.
They said that this year thus far, we have had not anywhere near the number of tornadoes that we would normally have, which indicates some kind of change is going on, apparently.
But, you know, these weather patterns change over years.
If you look, for example, at tree ring research, where they take the very old trees and cut them in half, of course, and look at the actual rings, they can tell there are fluctuations every so many hundred years or even thousands of years if you look at some of the other fossilized data.
So we go through these swings, and we may be at this time in our history preparing to go through a major change.
Yeah, I would say it's probably underway right now, actually.
I have no idea.
They're upping the forecast for the number of hurricanes they think there's going to be.
I know an El Niño is building quickly again in the Pacific, and so I guess we're really in for it, which means that business for you is probably going to be pretty interesting.
Yeah, unfortunately, you know, when you have these lulls, when things slow down, I get a little bit nervous because that usually means that Mother Nature's going to find some kind of a way or method to make up for it.
So, you know, the quiet before the storm fits the situation.
Yeah, it's quite dangerous in that part of the country when you have those supercell thunderstorms.
But you have to remember the majority of people that chase, believe it or not, this may shock some people, there's probably about 200 or 300 hardcore people who chase just for the thrill of it, for the fun of it.
I've had the winds that feed into a tornado, the forming tornado hit the vehicle I was driving back in Kansas in the early days of chasing when I didn't know any better.
I drove right into the area where the circulation actually begins.
And you can tell because there's very strong wind shifts all of a sudden.
And you notice things just aren't right.
The winds, matter of fact, they'll go from one direction to the next direction without warning all of a sudden and then back the other way.
So that was a good indication that I was in the wrong place.
But no, I've never actually been inside a tornado.
You've seen the classic footage, of course, of the people who were caught under the freeway bridge as a tornado passed directly above them or over them.
That's incredible.
What would have happened to the barometric pressure below these people?
Wouldn't they have lost eardrums, that sort of thing?
No, the pressure doesn't actually drop that much from what they know.
There's people who have been, and that's a great example, people who have been very close to tornadoes, and there's even instrumentation relatively close to some of the larger tornadoes.
The pressure wouldn't drop enough to hurt you.
But they found recently that underpasses are probably one of the least likely places you want to be during a tornado because they actually channel the winds.
So the old theory about going to an underpass has changed in recent years, and it's not the best place to be.
If you can find a small depression, you have to remember these winds, which can reach 318 miles per hour in an F5 tornado, are right above the surface.
So theoretically, if you can find a very small ditch, those winds will go right over you.
The problem you have is debris, debris flying within that zone of destruction can hit you.
And there have been cases recently where people did the right thing.
They did find a small ditch.
They laid in the ditch, and debris ended up hitting them and killing them.
So the best advice is to be as far away from a tornado as you can be if you see one coming.
Well, again, circling back to that famous shark movie I was talking about, I remember a scene in which a bunch of good old boys with beer and guns, they were overloading a boat and on their way out to kill that there shark, you know.
And I remember a scene in which one of the officials was standing on the shore just shaking his head, going, they're dead.
You know, they're dead.
And it's kind of like the hundreds of storm chasers that you're talking about.
They go off out of Amarillo and other places during the really worst of it and chase these things.
You really think there ought to be some sort of legislation about this?
In other words, when you see a front developing or something that's obviously going to produce a tornado or very likely will of an F4 or F5 or IT, something really awful in the Midwest, do you get on a plane and move or what do you do?
April 26th, 1991, I believe that was the year when there was a major outbreak of tornadoes.
You could tell days in advance.
You could see the system coming.
But most of the time with tornado chasing, you actually place yourself, as you know, as you used to do in Amarillo, in the best location.
And from about, oh, the last week in April through about the second or third week in June, somewhere within that region, now it may be Midland Texas all the way up to almost the Canadian border, there will be somewhat of a regular season.
You may have to do quite a bit of traveling, but there will be tornadoes every few days.
So once you're there, it's a matter of forecasting.
It's a matter of going over the data.
The trucks we use for chasing all have weather computers and cell phones and laptops and all these wonderful gadgets.
So we're forecasting continuously.
From the morning when the first reports come out, we're looking at data throughout the whole day on our laptops and refine our chase area to one location.
And then, of course, once the storms go up, it's more of a visual chase than it is so much of a data chase at that point.
Haley is one of the premier storm chasers in America, and we've got a lot of storms to chase in America.
I just got a really interesting email.
It says, hi, Art.
My name is Frankie Munis, and I'm probably slaughtering your name.
I hope not, Frankie.
He says, I play on Fox's Malcolm in the Middle, where I play Malcolm.
My friend Haley turned me on to your show, and I think the show is really interesting.
So interesting.
Every night I go to bed, I flip it on, listen the whole night while I'm asleep.
Anyway, I heard your show on the shadow people, and I still believe in them.
Well, just wanted to write and tell you I'm a big fan.
Best wishes in the near future.
That's Malcolm.
Best wishes to you too, Malcolm.
We're big fans of your show, and I suspect we've been watching you longer than you've been listening to us, but it's good to have you aboard.
It'd Be a lot of fun to interview you one night if you would enjoy doing that.
I'm sure we could fit in an hour's slot for Malcolm.
That's an incredible show, and it deserves every single award that it's received.
And boy, it's received a lot of them.
All right, we'll get back to the weather and storm chasing, and there's just been a lot of weather here, so it's a grand topic for me this night.
All right, Warren, this may be outside your immediate storm chasing experience.
However, it may relate to what we're talking about tonight.
You know, we've got a situation in the world right now where, for example, the Larson B ice shelf just collapsed and is in a million pieces right now and can be seen from satellite down at the Antarctic.
At the North Pole, our Navy is talking about a new ocean because it's melting.
No more subs being able to hide under the ice up there because there won't be any ice.
In Alaska, the tundra is melting.
I mean, there are some fairly significant changes going on in the world right now, and that's bound to affect your work.
And over the course of the last 20 years, I've noticed changes.
The best example, if you ask anyone here in the southwest, in Tucson, about the summer monsoons, they'll tell you that in the last 10 to 15 years, the monsoons have changed.
As a matter of fact, most of what I would consider my best lightning shots were accomplished 10 or 15 years ago when we had a large volume, a large number of summer thunderstorms.
But in the last 10 or 15 years, that number has dropped off.
You can talk to people that have been in one area long enough to notice changes, some of them very subtle, changes in wildlife, the number of animals or amphibians in a certain area, all these things, you know, collectively they do signal that something is changing.
I've been published in probably almost every news magazine, certainly here in the United States and even in foreign countries.
And it's amazing some of the things weather photos are used for.
I've seen them used for everything from puzzles to on cigarette lighters, billboards, you name it.
When you think about it, if you consciously think about it, pick up a magazine in your house right now, you'll probably find a stock-type weather photo.
I have watched a couple of specials on tornadoes, and I've seen some of the F5 tornadoes, and it's hard to imagine anything on Earth more frightening than something of that magnitude.
And as a matter of fact, the scientists were near the same tornado with portable Doppler instruments, and they actually recorded the highest wind speed ever recorded of a storm.
And that was, I believe, 318 miles per hour, which is the top-range top end of an F5.
Well, yeah, if you look at the physics, you know, and weather, one of the things that fascinates me is the physics involved.
You know, if you're talking about a softball-sized cell phone falling at 100 miles per hour, if you're talking about the wind speed, the damage from tornadoes, there's no doubt that there have been tornadoes with winds that have exceeded the 318 range.
Some of the damage is incredible.
There's one wonderful story the old-timers in Nebraska like to tell about a tornado back, I believe it was in the 40s or 50s, it hit and carried away farm machinery that they've never found.
You would think something of that substance, I mean, it would certainly take some of it out, but the major body of the thing would have to have more or less survived.
And so, oh, gosh, I wonder if that'll turn up in a desert in Africa somewhere.
I start in the winter with blizzards and work the way through the spring with tornadoes and then lightning in the desert southwest during the summer, late summer, and then, of course, hurricanes along the Gulf, the Atlantic, and occasionally down in Baja during the late fall.
And then I usually get three or four months to relax and go through everything and do the marketing.
I've always wondered, you know, during a hurricane, the practice lately has been to take some poor correspondent who doesn't seem to have anything better to do that day, I guess, and say, listen, you're on an airplane.
You're going down to where we think the eye of the hurricane is going to be.
And here's this poor guy hanging on to a lamp pole, you know, with a camera Pointed at him, and you wonder, man, he drew the shot strong.
Well, I tell you what, most journalists, and I believe there's even old footage of Dan Rather recovering those storms, and I could be wrong, and I've heard him say once that he enjoyed covering those kind of storms.
You know, there's just some attraction to weather.
It's not, as in news, and one of the reasons I got out of news was there was all this violence, man against man, you know, and now, of course, we have the terrorism.
I didn't want to cover that because to me, that was just something completely out of control.
And if you were killed by it, it would be, in my opinion, somewhat worthless in the scheme of things.
While on the other hand, nature, which is just so magnificent, no one has any control over.
You know, you can't have a peace accord to end all the supercells in Texas tomorrow.
No, actually, there's another side of this, and a lot of people won't understand it.
But I've not seen an F5, but I've seen plenty of tornadoes.
And the listeners aren't going to understand this because people have been killed, and a lot of houses have been destroyed, and towns have been destroyed.
But there's something incredibly beautiful about that demonstration of nature.
Beautiful is a dangerous word to use, but it's true, isn't it?
And, you know, it's interesting, if you've noticed, whenever there's wind damage, and I'm not talking about today, but I'm talking about usually associated with a regular storm where there's precipitation involved.
People will always insist, if there's any damage, that it was a tornado.
And I've noticed this over the years.
It's kind of fascinating.
If there's any kind of wind damage, it's almost like people want it to be a tornado.
They will insist, if you see them on the news or if you see them at the scene, they'll always say it was a tornado.
Even if the damage is all in one direction and it's obviously just straight line wind damage.
It's amazing how people are so fascinated.
They want to associate that damage with something like a tornado.
Well, that's because their brains are trying to assimilate what could have done this, and they just don't believe anything other than something as violent as a tornado could have done that much damage.
I figured that after all these years of chasing and surviving, I must have some kind of an angel.
That's the best reasoning I can give you for the name.
But yeah, it's a custom design chase truck.
It has just about everything you can imagine inside of it from the fibrillator in case we run across an accident or someone is struck by lightning, which is one of the biggest dangers when you're chasing.
To computers, safety equipment has a full five-point harness system like NASCAR in it and a roll cage.
But I think I would much rather have a truck out there that was attracting the lighting with me in it and being relatively safe inside a vehicle, which you are, as opposed to being standing out there and having me being the biggest target.
Yeah, as long as the windows are up and you're not touching anything that's grounded to metal, you're safe.
Now, there have been, believe it or not, this is rather bizarre, but there have been instances where people were driving and the tires actually blew out and they lost control of the vehicle.
In other words, that's actually the lightning then finding its way to ground through the metal of your car and then ultimately through the rubber of the tire and just blowing it up.
Well, probably through the rim somehow, and it probably, I would imagine, this is just a guess, probably superheats the air inside the tire somehow through the process.
Here in the desert, we have these things called dust devils, and they look for all the world like miniature tornadoes.
Now, what is the difference in the physics, if there is a difference, between a dust devil and a tornado that's formed as a result of a, or, you know, comes from, is mothered from a thunderstorm?
The difference is a tornado is associated with a thunderstorm.
Right.
A dust devil is more of a thermal feature, which results from the thermals rising from the desert floor, and usually associated with high temperatures and sometimes a little wind.
I had a group of three or four kids and we would sit out in the corner of this giant vacant dirt lot, out in the 110, 115 degree temperature, waiting for the right dust devil.
And off we'd go, riding into the center.
And there was a couple of occasions I actually got into the middle of them.
I remember the interior, the first thing was it was as hot as a blast.
You could barely breathe.
I don't know exactly what physics are involved in there, but the inside temperature was even hotter than the outside.
You know, and I've thought about in recent history nowadays to go back and do it with some professional equipment and see if I can actually photograph it or videotape it.
Of course, I'm sure if I was out there doing it, it probably wouldn't be too long until the guys in little white uniforms show up.
Most of the time, the local authorities want some kind of weather update.
And I have a pretty good working relationship with most of them as I do with the Weather Service offices throughout the plains.
But, yeah, you know, law enforcement and the spotters really don't get a lot of the credit they deserve.
I mean, in any community right now, a matter of fact, as we're talking as late as it is, I'm sure somewhere in the United States right now there are storm spotters out looking at a storm, reporting it back to the Weather Service.
storm spotters are really overlooked and we hear all this about chasing but storm spotters and the people that work at the weather service are often overlooked in all this very important very important they save a lot of lives and they unfortunately never get credit for what they do all right I'll hold it right there Warren Fadley is my guest.
I suppose you could adjust a Doppler-type radar to pick something like that, but generally they're not.
Now, there are special radars that are used around airport to detect these things.
And I should note that generally when you're talking about microbursts, you're talking about a very small concentrated area, usually somewhere less than, say, three miles in area.
So it's a very, very small area.
And they don't last that long.
They usually last less than five minutes.
But again, if you're in a plane or if you're on the ground near one, they can do quite a bit of damage.
Well, as I always tell people, the safest bet is to have planned ahead for that.
But if you get in a situation like you just described, the best thing you could do is to find some place underground, no matter what it is.
You're always going to be safer underground, in a basement, in a depression.
You know, if you were an experienced storm chaser, there's a chance you could get in a car and drive away if you knew what you were doing.
But most people, when they see a tornado coming towards them, they panic.
I mean, they lose their mind.
Tornadoes are really odd because they're somewhat mesmerizing.
And even after the number I've seen, there's still something about them that I've equated to like you can get transfixed staring at a fire in a fireplace.
I heard, Warren, that occasionally tornadoes have actually become so strong, so fast, that they've broken away from the thunderstorm that was feeding them and moved ahead of it.
Well, during the dissipation stage of a tornado, you can still have a very weak circulation that may not be associated with the main rotation in the storm, but that would be very short-lived and probably wouldn't do any damage.
Now, you can have things at the leading edge.
You can have these vortices at the leading edge of a thunderstorm known as gustnadoes, but they're not generally associated with any kind of large-scale rotation as you have with the storm.
Located at the leading edge of a thunderstorm or just in front of it is that we were talking earlier, some of the winds, the microburst-type winds standing out from the storm will kick up these little, very similar to dust devils, in front of the storm, and they're often mistaken.
I've seen them.
And if you're, Depending on which way you're looking at the storm, and if you don't have your bearings straight, it will look like a real tornado.
And many of the false reports you get around thunderstorms are gustnadoes.
I was looking at some of the forecasts for today now.
I guess it was tomorrow, just a little bit ago, but for Tuesday.
And, you know, there is a risk up there of severe weather.
And you figure with these winds heading up in that direction and the dew points are a little bit higher and those higher temperatures, something's going to give.
So if you live up in that part of the country, you might want to keep an eye on the weather tomorrow.
No, it would have to be something extraordinary, something that had enough positive elements and then a fewer negative elements to go.
There are a few situations where I would actually do that.
But you have to remember with severe weather, you can forecast a day in advance.
You can forecast hours in advance.
But a lot of times it comes down to, believe it or not, one or two degrees difference in the upper atmosphere, which we call capping, which holds back the development of storms.
And sometimes that can be just a few degrees that will prevent major tornadic outbreaks.
The people in the planes probably have no idea how many times that chasers have been sitting out there, and the atmosphere has come within just a few degrees of letting loose absolutely horrific weather.
The jet stream is one of the most critical elements for the formation of a tornado.
You need to have that upper level flow.
You need to have bearing winds from the surface up through the atmosphere.
Very important to get the rotation going in a storm.
The jet stream also creates lift in the atmosphere.
When you have any body of fast-moving currents over an air, you're going to have some upswelling, which will give you some lift.
The jet stream also vents storms.
Most of us see storms out here in the desert.
They go up and they look tremendous.
But what happens is they collapse on themselves, all that weight, and they just fall and collapse.
Well, with the supercell storms you have out in the plains that create the majority of the large tornadoes, you do have jet stream winds, which are venting the top of those storms, allowing the updrafts to survive for longer periods.
Well, the jet stream generally, when you hear someone referring to the jet stream, they're talking about somewhere in the range of anywhere from probably 10,000 feet on up to 40,000, 50, 60,000 feet.
All right, the reason I ask that is because when you start talking about the supercells you and I have been talking about, the kind that form out the panhandle and up into Oklahoma, those supercells, I believe, can get as high as 50 or 60,000 feet, can't they?
Well, you know, weather forecasting is kind of interesting because of all the sciences, it's probably one of the ones that has not really advanced as fast as a lot of other science.
But, you know, I'm not a scientist, although I do admire the science of it immensely.
It just doesn't attract meteorology, doesn't attract, I think, the most brilliant, the large pools of brilliant people, although it certainly has a few people, many people who are gifted.
But it doesn't attract the kind of people, I think, who are looking for money to be able to.
Well, you know, weather forecasting has come along very slow.
We have things now called atmospheric profilers, which are Doppler radars that point vertically.
So you can actually tell the wind speeds if you have the right configuration.
You can actually tell which way the winds are blowing without setting up the standard.
You know, everyone's probably, most people have seen the weather balloons that they release to gather data as they go up to the atmosphere.
Well, the problem is here in the U.S., most of the time they only launch those twice a day.
They launch them in the a.m. and they launch them in the p.m.
So when most severe weather occurs, which is towards, you know, after mid-afternoon to early evening, they don't really know what's going on in the atmosphere as far as temperatures go.
For example, we were talking earlier about the cap and the temperatures, how important that is for severe weather.
Occasionally, if it looks like it's going to be a big day, they'll send up an extra balloon.
But that's one of the weaknesses.
Just an example of one of the weaknesses in forecasting is there's that large void of data between certain hours that prevent forecasters from making a really, really positive forecast.
And there's other little things like that.
So I think at some point, somebody has to be willing to put the money and the technology into it to make more accurate forecasts.
Although, of course, nowadays, I think you can say the forecasting is a lot more accurate than it was, say, 10 or 20 years ago.
And it's not because of negligence with the tools that the forecasters have.
And I think the technology, they do the best they can with what they have.
But, you know, weather is sickle.
It's really bizarre.
You just never know from one day to the next what's going to happen.
And you do the best you can, but there's no foolproof method yet.
Within really a few hours to forecast, of course, with Doppler radar, which is one of the greatest, in my opinion, tools that the Weather Service has nowadays, you can dissect a storm and tell if it has tornadic potential sometimes an hour in advance when the storm first.
But the tornado's passing right next to a farmhouse and probably missed it.
It looks like probably about a quarter of a mile from nailing that.
As a matter of fact, when I was sitting there videotaping that, there was a group of people, local people there, talking about the people that lived there.
Well, you have to remember that the majority of tornadoes are made up of individual vortices within that circulation.
So when you see on television a tornado, it's not just usually one large circulation.
It's a series of sub-vortices within that circulation, which if you think of it, the damage that does, instead of having one area of circulation, you may have numerous areas near spinning, you know, 200 or 300 miles per hour.
You can imagine the efficiency of damage and also why you have sometimes unusual damage.
You know, one building will be destroyed and the one next to it is not because of the way the physics of the structure of that vortice.
This one, you can see there's the main one on the ground and that circulation around that area is actually some of the other vortices that are spinning off of it.
And sometimes you'll see them they'll come out horizontally.
There was a matter of fact from that same day in Oklahoma City, there's a classic shot of a large tornado on the ground with a horizontal tube coming out the side of it, a smaller one.
You know, there's some researchers in Oklahoma that are doing that right now.
A couple years ago, they had Operation Vortex, which went out a massive research project.
They were using planes and research vehicles.
And the data from that is just fantastic to read because they've learned so much now, especially with the portable Dopplers, which they're taking out into the field, able to dissect storms up close and personal, to get all kinds of different readings at different levels to see why these things form, why they dissipate, why sometimes the perfect storm does not create a tornado, which can be just as important as the ones that do.
I mean, for example, they found out that a lot of the tornadoes are the result of boundaries left over from other storms.
Matter of fact, if I remember right on this day, I believe there were some existing, on the Oklahoma Day in 1999, there were some boundaries from previous precipitation earlier in the day.
Just as a matter of interest, since you do this as A full-time profession.
When things are totally calm and it's a beautiful day and the birds are singing and there's no bad weather anywhere, do you sit around and pout or what?
I was just wondering, what does a full-time photojournalist do on a really nice day?
We don't come to live, we know we don't come to live This is Coast, and we'll be right back.
unidentified
We know you're here.
You know we know you're here.
What do we do?
You want to do that?
You don't have to shout or feel about, you can't even blame everything.
Thank you.
She doesn't give you time for the job as she walks up your home.
And you fall for yourself, look which direction completely doesn't give Mother Brick Hard, never market the thought But the hint that she leads you to Be safe, As I feel my light, it's like a red for running through the air of the camp.
To reach Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nye, from west of the Rockies, dial 1-800-618-8255.
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This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell on the Premier Radio Networks.
Warren Fadley, who's one of our nation's premier storm chasers, something a lot of people would consider to be an insane career path to follow, is with us this night, this morning actually.
And I'm getting ready to ask him some pretty wild questions, so I hope he's ready.
If you are, it's coming up.
Now this should be getting to get very interesting.
Warren, you mentioned a phrase a little while ago that keyed memory for me, Perfect Storm.
Of course, it was a movie called The Perfect Storm.
And occasionally, storms can sort of come together, can't they?
It doesn't happen all that frequently, but large storms can come together and become one.
You know, the elements that help create the large storm systems, like the perfect storm, for example, it's really a timing of elements coming together at the right time.
Whether you're talking about the wind you had today or the perfect storm, you know, it's like a machine.
Everything has to work at the right time and come together at the right place to create.
The wrong way, correct.
And as a matter of fact, I just noticed here, this is kind of interesting.
They just issued a high risk for tomorrow, or actually it would be today, it would be Tuesday for portions of across Minnesota, western Wisconsin, northwestern Iowa.
As a matter of fact, a lot of people probably don't know what high risk means, but I'll tell you that that's a very, very rare rating that the Storm Prediction Center gives.
You see only a handful of these, maybe one or two a year issue.
The moisture up there and the heat, and those of the winds are going to come together tomorrow.
And if you live up in that portion of the country, you'll want to really watch the weather tomorrow, the forecasting.
Again, that's very rare they issue these.
And I saw the red come up on the screen.
Matter of fact, if you go to my, we were talking about the stormchaser.com on the left-hand side, there's actually a little graphic there from the SPC, and you can click on there, and it'll give you all the data.
If you look on the right-hand, or actually, excuse me, the left-hand side, you come down there about halfway, it says today severe weather outlook from the SPC, and I put that there so people can go there.
But when we were talking at the break, I looked on there and saw that red, and I'm like, oh, boy.
I think the upper atmosphere, I looked over this real quick.
I didn't have time to go over the whole statement, but I think the winds, as we were talking earlier about the jet stream, and this all ties together, the winds are unidirectional.
They're coming from one direction.
Instead of having that turning in the atmosphere, which will create more rotation in the storm, I think they're looking here at more of a straight-line damaging wind event and maybe large hell.
Now, that could change.
Again, this is preliminary.
And in the morning, I'll tell you, I don't know how many times I've woke up and looked at one of these at night and got all excited when I'm out chasing.
And it's taken down to a slight risk, which is one of the lowest ratings.
So, you know, severe weather like this changes hourly.
A lot of it seems awfully technical here for people like yourself, but it says parameters appear to be coming together for a significant severe wind event across portions of the upper Mississippi Valley on Tuesday.
Oh, wow.
So all of that energy is about to be converted.
Does that mean that it's going to suddenly, after all this happens, get cool?
I don't remember there being a real strong cold front associated as you normally have this time of year with this system.
This is more of a dynamic system as opposed to, say, what you associate with a cold front coming down and sweeping across the country.
This is a very intense low-pressure system.
The one you had, again, is working its way up there, and when it hits that moisture...
It's heading their way.
The strong winds, when you mix that with, you know, when you mix any kind of a strong wind with surface heating dew points, you're looking for trouble.
All right, here's a question that everybody asks, and I've had people call me up and say, you know, there's got to be a way to stop a tornado.
People have envisioned blowing, literally blowing them up, putting some sort of very high explosive or maybe fuel air explosive or, you know, something or another in a forming tornado that would cause it to disperse instead of to continue to form.
In your opinion, is there any possibility that could work?
Warren, that leads us into even a touchier couple of areas here.
One is there are a lot of people who believe that there are ongoing attempts at weather control, that our government would not talk to us about it for the very reasons that you just spoke about, that they'd probably get blame, but that they are secretly experimenting with modifying our weather.
And I'm sure I've heard rumors, I've talked to old-timers who have told me back even in World War II, there were secret projects to try to create cloud cover, for example, or to create fog or to modify the weather.
I believe both here, or I should say the United States, Europe, the Allies, and also in Germany at the time, I believe there were attempts to modify the weather.
But again, the amount of energy it would take, I think, to change any kind of weather system is not available now.
And then, even more controversial, I've got to at least run this by you.
There are, I warrant, thousands of people across the country right now that believe they are seeing something they have not seen before.
Now, we all know what contrails are.
You know, they're condensation, little wispy condensation things that appear behind airplanes, sometimes linger for a little while, but most times just sort of fade away.
In recent years, on my program and many others, people have begun to talk of what they are calling chemtrails.
And they believe that something is, I guess that means that you're not too familiar with this or it's just too controversial.
No, these are, and I've seen them myself, so I can describe it to you.
On an otherwise not cloudy day, you will see many jets laying out patterns, frequently an X-type pattern.
And instead of the normal dispersal of the contrails that you would see, just a slow wisping away, these grow sort of a dirtier color, they expand, and they actually become kind of a dirty, cloudy day.
And there are many people who believe that there are ongoing experiments, for what reason we're not sure, weather modification or something else, that's being performed by some jet aircraft.
Pretty wild stuff, I know, but believe me, many people have seen and believe this to be true.
Well, you know, I personally haven't heard that, and I personally haven't seen anything.
Now, I've seen contrails that will fan out, depending on what the atmosphere is doing.
Sometimes they'll dissipate rather quickly, and sometimes they will fan out and look more like cirrus.
Sometimes you'll have a system moving in ahead of that, and the cirrus will blend in with the contrails.
You can have, in some cases, it's kind of rare, but you can have contrail shadows where the sun actually hits the contrail and hits a cloud below, say a cirrus cloud, and you actually see a gray shadow below it.
But I've never heard a theory of anything like that.
So then, is it fair to say, do you think that if attempts at weather modification are going on either in the private sector or in the government sector, they probably wouldn't do a lot of talking about it?
Well, the best thing is to stay informed by a weather radio.
That's, to me, is the most important thing you can do, is to stay informed.
Boy, do I agree with that?
And another thing is if you're new to an area, if you're new to an area, if you've moved from, say, Las Vegas to Amarillo, Texas, I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, you might want to start learning about severe weather.
You know, don't just take it for granted someone's going to warn you.
There was a tornado warning three or four nights ago in Amarillo, I believe, at 2 or 3 in the morning.
So never take anything for granted.
Learn about severe weather.
And most importantly, have a plan if severe weather strikes.
If you live in hurricane-prone areas, you want to have specific safety measures for hurricanes.
If you live in Tornado Alley, you want to have knowledge of what to do, where to go.
That's always a big question.
I know you brought that up earlier when you asked what should you do if you were in the farmhouse.
It shouldn't get to the point where you don't know what to do.
Yes, and one of the saddest things I've seen as a journalist, and it always breaks my heart to this day, it still does, is when you see children killed when a tornado strikes.
There's absolutely no excuse for that.
Children have a whole different way of looking at things, at storms and things.
They expect adults to take them to safety if there's a storm.
They rely on it.
So it's always important to have a plan.
If the kids are at home alone, make sure they have a plan.
Make sure they know where to go.
Make sure they know where the shelters are.
That's the best advice is just stay informed and have a plan.
WarrenFadeley.com, which, of course, you can't do under intellectual property law.
Right, right.
I guess the point here is that, you know, even with storm chasing, with the little fame I get, there's always going to be these bizarre, really kind of odd things that happen.
Well, believe it or not, with a laptop and a really good cell phone company that has a nationwide type plant you can use in any location, I can get data.
Last year, for example, there were only one or two times, and we're talking about Chase Area covers, the Chaseville area of Toyota Valley covers like 250,000, 100,000 miles of area.
There were only one or two times when I was in the absolute middle of nowhere where I couldn't acquire data.
I mean, I'm able to download now full-color radar.
I'm not going to be able to, I'd have to sit there and wait quite a while or the connection may not be stable enough.
But generally what I'm looking for, or what any chaser is looking for when they're out there, are surface data and the outlook, like we just discussed here for tomorrow.
That kind of written text data is generally what you're looking for.
And I looked over at my Chase partner and I said, you know, can you see?
Because there was glass flying in the car.
The windshield was shattered.
It was just kind of going in and out from the wind, pulsing.
It took another hit, and I figured it was going to cave in.
So at that point, I had a large map up against my chest, thinking, well, you know, the next one's going to come all the way through because there's really nothing holding that windshield together.
And about that time, we got through it.
And I'll tell you what, it was nerve-wracking to say the least.
But most chasers will tell you that getting into big hell is very scary.
Well, I actually have commercial insurance, which covers normal driving.
I pay the extra and go the full commercial route for the vehicle.
As far as that kind of damage goes, I self-insure myself.
As much as people might not like insurance companies, I would not take the advantage of that of going out through my own decision and damage something.
And just like that storm, I think it ended up doing $700 or $800 damage just to the windows, a couple windows it took out.
But that's all self-insured.
I pay for that.
I don't claim that because that is part of, in my opinion, part of business operations.
And now, of course, if someone slams into the back of me when I'm driving home from chasing, that's a whole different issue or something that's in the normal course of business.
All right, here's another big question we had today.
Then I'm going to get to callers.
I'm sorry, callers.
We'll be right with you.
With the tremendous wind we had here today, there was an argument that went on about whether you're better off having a window cracked open to in some way equalize the pressure when you're having like 100 mile-an-hour winds or near 100 mile-an-hour winds, or you're better off having everything sealed up.
A lot of people say, well, you leave something open, you give the wind an avenue to get in.
That would certainly be true in a bigger, you know, if there was a bigger opening, but I just don't know.
Yeah, you don't want to, and the other thing is you run the risk of being in front of that window trying to open it when the glass shatters and being injured.
Warren, I've got a personal experience and a question for you.
It was an evening many years back driving from the Colorado River, from Lake Cavasu City down to Parker.
And my dad and I decided to do a little storm chasing of our own.
And we were driving through a monsoon storm that had been building up all day long and was dissipating pretty good.
And we started following it, and it was heading along the river.
And as we were going through it, my dad decided, you know, we better remove the coax off our two-meter antenna, our radio off the pickup truck we were driving there.
So we undid the coax off the radio and laid it on the floor.
Well, we didn't realize the coax is very close to the seat post where it bolts into the floor.
And we were driving to this storm, there was a weird ticking noise inside the vehicle.
We couldn't figure out what was coming from.
I happened to look down by my foot and see this blue arc that if anybody knows what a blue arc spark from a spark plug to something grounding looks like, that's the way it looked.
It'd start out really slow.
Within just a couple seconds, it'd start arcing very rapidly.
Oh, that's really.
It would completely stop, then the lightning would go off.
And then it would be like this for a couple, three, four seconds.
But, yeah, when the antennas, you know, a lot of times, believe it or not, I've been there storms and the antennas will actually sizzle and pop.
And that is the energy building up.
Now, that doesn't necessarily say there's going to be that connection made between the ground, the cloud, the cloud, and the ground, whichever way it is.
That doesn't mean that.
And I have to tell you this story.
This is really quick, but it's awfully funny.
I was on top of a mountain here in Arizona shooting lightning a couple years ago.
And there were a number of other photographers there watching what I was doing.
And I heard the antennas and saw them starting to pop and sizzle.
Well, I thought, I'm about to stay in here.
So I jumped in the truck immediately, packed everything up, and these guys are all just laughing.
There's Warren, the Storm Chaser, jumping in his truck when there's a little bit of lightning.
About five seconds later, a lightning bolt hit must have been maybe a quarter mile away.
And these guys jumped about two feet off the ground.
So when something, normally I've got like a 100-foot tower here at the house, and I've got 175 feet on each side of the tower coming off 100 feet for low-band work.
And of course, if you don't have that insulated, when there's a lot of wind, you get incredible voltages.
But, or in a thunderstorm, it gets really mean.
I mean, you get big arcs that appear in the antenna tuner to ground.
But gee, Liz, for a two-meter antenna to be taking a charge like that, you're in a very dangerous area.
First of all, that you were asking about the predictability of weather, that the actual theory of chaos actually came out of weather prediction by Dr. Lorenzo.
We had a paper that came around everybody read, and I think they sent it originally to NASA that were telling everybody that it was written by an aeronautical engineer, and he was postulating that a tornado was actually where it gets its power is where it intersects the Earth's magnetic field and actually turns itself into an electric motor.
Never heard that before, and I don't know if there's any scientific fact to it.
Personally, from what I know and what I've seen, I would doubt that would have any effect on it because the scientists have nailed down probably better than 50, maybe 60% of what's happening.
There was a shot CNN Got some video footage that a pilot took that I saw recently of a tornado in the air, like two or three tornadoes, right out this guy's window.
And you've got to understand, people don't get this.
They don't understand.
A lot of them don't.
And you can't blame them.
To them, it's just terrifying stuff.
It's not fun.
unidentified
I understand.
But I have a couple of questions.
One is I have a very frustrating situation that you don't have when you chase tornadoes.
And that is when I want to go to where I think a hurricane is going to make a landfall, I'm not going to be able to get there because they're going to be evacuating.
You know, that was, in my opinion, the last great uncovered hurricane by the media.
Up to that point, the media, you know, as Art pointed out earlier, would send out one guy to stand there in the rain.
But with all the new cable stations since then, and a lot of them have come on air since then, when there's any kind of a hurricane threat now, I can guarantee you you're going to see massive coverage.
And the problem with that now is that because of that coverage, what they're doing now is they are the evacuations and the areas they're closing off are happening a lot further in advance.
With Hurricane Andrew, they didn't really get crazy there until a day or two before.
I mean, this has been going on.
They knew it was coming.
But nowadays, they close up everything real, real, real soon.
So you have to get there days and days in advance to get access.
But you really can't.
You know, that's the problem.
unidentified
You can't do that because it'll change course on you for sure.
I'm going to hold you over, Caller, and just stand by.
I'll bring you back with Warren.
And we are going to continue to take calls for Warren Fagley.
Fascinating topic.
The weather always is.
Boy, it was wild here today.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
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Sitting in a building under a 195-foot tower in near 100-mile-per-hour winds makes for a really, really, really interesting day.
That's the kind of day Ramona and I had today, and a very tragic day for an awful lot of people here in the Prump Valley, where we had nearly 100 mile per hour straight line winds for three straight hours.
It was absolutely terrifying.
Warren Fabley is my guest, and that's exactly what we're talking about.
The weather.
It's getting pretty wild out there, folks.
We'll continue in just a moment.
If you have a question and you have a telephone, you're in.
Stay right where you are.
All right, back to Warren Paley.
Warren, the caller's still on the line.
I thought that was such a good question.
You obviously have little tricks you can use to get in.
There have been a couple eyewitness reports about looking up into a tornado, but I'll tell you the problem with that, and that is I myself and a lot of other chasers will tell you, when those clouds are very turbulent, you can look up and there's all kinds of circulation.
It's not uncommon to look up and see swirls going right above you that are not necessarily tornadic swirls.
They may just be the agitation in the clouds of some low-level shear going on.
There is one account, I can't remember the specifics, but there was one account where there was actually a tornado with damage that moved over a location, and the gentleman there described in the story how he looked up into the tornado.
So that, you know, it's possible, but then again, there's a lot of things that can fool you.
If I knew I could do it safely, I'd do it tomorrow.
If there was a way to do it, I suppose if you had a ditch and you could crawl into it and let it go over you, that almost happened a couple times by accident.
Last year in Childress, Texas, I waited too long in one location and decided not to move, and I had the actual, what we call the mesocyclone go right above me.
I mean, you could actually see the rotation, like I was saying before, rapidly rotating right above me.
And of course, afterwards, I really was upset with myself for doing something so stupid.
A tornado could have came down any second, but that's part of chasing.
One thing I do want to point out, Art is, you know, we've talked a lot about chasing and how exciting and fun and things like that.
But I also want to point out, because I did have someone email me at the break here and ask me about this, it's not always fun in games.
It's a lot of tragic, you know, there's a lot of tragedy associated with it.
And as a journalist, I've seen it.
My very first storm chase in 1987, ironically, the very first day I ever went storm chasing in the planes, I ended up in Saragosa, Texas, which had been hit by a violent tornado and killed, I think, 29 or 30 people.
And at that point as a journalist, I made it very clear to myself that my work from that moment on would involve safety and education.
And a lot of the work I do does go to the Red Cross and the Weather Service.
So I want everyone listening to know that it is chasing can be exciting like any other job, but there is a serious side of it.
Now, people should know that with an experienced storm chaser, for the most part, you're really much safer than you would be if you might be in the path of the storm otherwise because the storm chaser knows which way it's moving, which way to go.
I mean, unless you want to photograph the hell, but there are people who are driving what we call the core of the storm, the very dangerous part where you have the hill and you may have a tornado embedded in there.
I'm one of those people that enjoys and also respects weather.
There was one thing I wanted to mention was that we were sailing up at anchor during a very deep depression up in the North Channel of Georgian Bay when the worst storm I've ever seen in my entire life came at us with three levels of clouds and lateral lightning.
And my nephew was playing the end by the doors.
And I thought, if it was the end, it really, truly was the most frightening thing I've ever seen in my life.
A lot of wind.
But then it just went away.
It just rose up and went over us.
But what I was calling about was straight-line winds here in Detroit.
Detroit does not get a lot of severe weather.
We get typical summer storms and that sort of thing since I've been here my entire life and live very close to Lake St. Clair.
About 1996, we had our first, I believe it was the first time, experienced a straight-line wind and it tore up trees like I've never seen in my life, like a tornado would.
But only in a specific, like maybe the width of a half a mile, maybe three quarters of a mile, and that was it.
You know, it depends on what kind of winds you're talking about.
This winds from like you had today, which aren't necessarily associated with a convective type storm system, that are more associated with a low-pressure system, are winds that are associated with a storm.
You know, there's all kinds of complexities involved.
And again, we were talking earlier about the microbursts being very narrow, you know, maybe less than three miles in width.
It just depends on the type of storm or what's generating those winds.
And I don't know specifically what he was referring to.
Well, I don't think technically that would be the correct way to phrase it because, you know, the jet stream is a term, again, used for those winds generally around, you know, 30,000 feet, although there's different levels.
But when you have winds at the surface that strong, you could say, you know, maybe a better terminology would be jet stream type winds or something.
But it's not as though the atmosphere has suddenly, you know, something's changed where the jet stream is.
You know, we just have the absolute perfect setup with the Gulf of Mexico bringing the moisture into the central plains, you know, with the systems moving across the country from the west to the east.
It's just the perfect setup of cold air meeting warm air, warm, humid air.
You really, you know, couldn't have a better setup to create tornadoes.
You know, they're actually doing some research on that because of some of the recent footage that's been taken because when you see the damage, the damage actually, cars, for example, are actually lifted upwards.
Now, I don't believe there's actually what people think of a suction going on where the old theory of it going over a lake and sucking all the water out of it.
I don't think that occurs.
But the motion in the tornado, those vortices, there is some lift involved in that.
And you would have to really get with the scientists to find out the specific physics involved in there.
But I have seen debris lifted.
As a matter of fact, there was research done a few years ago where they went through damage, where tornadoes had struck areas and did surveys of where the debris ended up for checks, for example, which actually have a location and a name on them.
And these things were transported for hundreds and hundreds of miles across the country.
Quick experience, and on top of that, I got a question for him.
I don't know if you remember that one hurricane that came up the Gulf of Mexico like four or five years ago and the eye of it passed over Yuma, Arizona?
In a very strong tornado, how can a perfectly structured house on one side of the street be blown into Kinland and just a shack right on the other side of the street be blown over?
Well, technically, when you talk about an F-Zero, it's basically, I guess you would really say it was zero or one mile per hour.
And I do want to point out that it's not actually a tornado until there is some type of circulation on the ground, whether it's seen or not seen, whether it's just debris lifting up or you see the contact actually on the ground.
Which a lot of people don't know.
They'll see a funnel up in the air and they'll say, oh, it's a tornado, but it doesn't actually become a tornado until it actually makes ground.
With your earth or water or whatever it's touched up.
No, actually, that's just the condensation, what we refer to as a condensation funnel.
Of course, once it touches down, it may ingest some of that dirt.
And I've seen them, you know, matter of fact, it was a tornado a few years ago that went through, I believe it was Wichita, Kansas, that went through a guess where they have some kind of a garden.
And apparently the tornado turned pink momentarily, some of the witnesses said when it went through the flowers.
So a lot of it happened with the terrain and what it's hitting.
I've seen them go over red clay of Texas, and the base will be kind of a reddish color.
The sun may be shining on them a certain way, and they may take on kind of a...
Well, yeah, water spouts, I've got pictures here of them over water, and they are actually kind of blue, but that may just be that it's a background of the contracts that makes them look that way.
It sure is, and it's a wonderful website to explore, and you're going to end up bookmarking part of it.
Warren, thank you for being here.
Good luck.
And listen, listen, since you've got a cell phone, one of these nights when you're out there and you're really into something hot, let's arrange a way for you to get through to me.