Better radar, social media improves forecasting
Just over a year after a tornado ripped through parts of Windsor and LaSalle and as hurricane Harvey ravages Texas, forecasters closer to home have new tools to help monitor severe storm development.
Environment Canada meteorologist Geoff Coulson said improvements to American radar systems throughout the Great Lakes basin and better ways of monitoring social media posts are helping to identify severe weather patterns sooner.
Coulson said American forecasters last fall launched a new geostationary satellite, an earthorbiting satellite that revolves in the direction the earth rotates. It takes images of the same part of the earth all the time and provides information in real time.
Detroit radar is the main radar used for forecasting severe weather in Essex County.
As well, a full-spectrum of lightning information is now available to forecasters.
New equipment called a lightning mapper detects lightning that remains in a cloud or leaps to other clouds. Previously only a groundbased system, which detects cloud to ground lightning, was used.
“Research is saying when a storm changes the amount of lightning it’s producing or the type of lightning it’s producing, that can be an early indication of a storm that could be turning severe,” Coulson said.
Coulson said forecasters also now have better ways to monitor social media posts.
Last year, there were a number of social media posts as the LaSalle event was occurring and the Windsor tornado hit but Coulson said the way that forecasters were scanning radar or scanning social media wasn’t as efficient.
“They now have software that allows them to scan across social media platforms for a number of key phrases,” he said.
Streams of tweets or Facebook postings with certain criteria or hashtags will now alert weather forecasters that something is happening.
“Postings from a specific area, it certainly adds credibility to their reports and helps the forecaster make a better decision,” Coulson said. “In this day and age that’s a huge source of information for us for breaking weather.”
As for hurricane Harvey, Coulson said the really bad news for Texas is the storm continues to be very slow moving.
He said most forecasting models say the storm will be severely weakened by the time any remnant of it approaches southern Ontario.
Coulson said there’s still a chance for strong summer storms over the next few weeks but most indications point to cooler than normal temperatures.
“Generally it looks like temperatures are going to remain a little cooler than normal so that sort of downplays that risk a little bit as we head into September.”