Winter weather put on agencies’ radar; service pushes united front

The next time a winter storm hits Arkansas, the National Weather Service wants to make sure that the people who notify others about how bad it is are all on the same page.

To that end, the agency’s North Little Rock office has formalized what it calls its warning team — meteorologists, school districts, highway officials, utility companies and emergency management personnel — to facilitate getting accurate information out in the face of a storm.

“We’ve always had a warning team,” Steve Drillette, meteorologist in charge of the weather service office in North Little Rock, said during a workshop Wednesday. “We’ve had one for decades. The problem is we weren’t integrated.”

Integration will lead to a more informed public, he said.

“The more agencies come together and speak the same language, the more credible it is,” Drillette said. “Maybe somebody trusts a media station. Maybe someone trusts the weather service. If we’re all speaking the same language, it’s way more credible.”

By contrast, different voices saying different things about an approaching storm hurts everyone’s credibility, he said.

“If the public gets different messages from the warning team members, it doesn’t matter who is right, there’s going to be confusion out there,” he said. “The warning will be degraded if we’re all speaking in a different voice.”

But syncing up storm information can be easier said than done. The integration effort comes at a time when sophisticated weather forecast models available online can be posted on social media as gospel and spread as fast as a California wildfire.

Keith Monahan, chief meteorologist for Little Rock television station, KARK-TV, Channel 4, since 2011, said he and other broadcast weather forecasters see the “uninformed model tweeters” whenever the potential exists for bad weather and have to spend time “fighting the people who put out the worst-case model.”

Jeff Baskin, chief meteorologist for KLRT-TV, Channel 16, said workers at his station avoid responding to them directly — “we don’t want to give them any credibility” — and instead “flood” social media with their own weather-related posts.

That said, even the National Weather Service meteorologists say they cannot predict snow or ice accumulation amounts with unfailing accuracy.

Dennis Cavanaugh, warning coordination meteorologist for the weather service in North Little Rock, said monitors record only ground-level temperatures, not the temperatures or other weather data available at, say, 5,000 feet or higher.

For that, agency meteorologists rely on weather balloons that are sent aloft twice a day at 12-hour intervals, he said. What happens in the atmosphere between those times often can affect the forecast in unforeseen ways, he said.

“While we do the best forecast we can … there’s always that little bit of uncertainty,” Drillette said.

Wednesday’s meeting was part of an effort to prepare for the state’s winter weather season.

The Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department enlists its own weather-forecasting company for five months beginning Nov. 1, mainly to monitor road-surface temperatures. The company can forecast — on a county level — when to begin treating the roads or plowing them.

The department has 60 belly-plow trucks. Its fleet includes a 12-truck strike force based in central Arkansas that can be sent anywhere in the state. The belly-plow trucks, which are bigger than the agency’s regular dump trucks, have plows installed underneath instead of on the front of the truck. The plow position allows the weight of the truck to keep the blade on the road surface and more effectively plow up snow and ice.

“Four years ago, we didn’t have any,” said John Mathis, the agency’s assistant state maintenance engineer.

The agency also has 55 tons of rock salt and 500,000 gallons of brine positioned in various quantities around the state, which Mathis said is enough to handle “one good storm.”

Wednesday’s workshop included a table-top exercise that Cavanaugh led to allow participants to discuss better ways to coordinate and to message.

Tim Gehring, the Northwest area coordinator for the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management, suggested that the National Weather Service change the terms it uses for “watches” and “warnings,” contending that the broader public often doesn’t distinguish between the two.

A winter storm watch, for example, usually is issued four days out whenever meteorologists are 50 percent or more confident that 4 inches or more of snow will accumulate in 12 hours or less.

Warnings are issued when that confidence is 80 percent or higher. They generally are issued 24 hours or less ahead of an approaching storm.

“Everybody thinks a watch is a warning,” Gehring said. “Alliteration kills us.”

Participants also discussed the National Weather Service’s “reasonable worst-case scenario,” which helps emergency officials prepare for a severe storm that has as little as a 10 percent to 20 percent chance of occurring.

“This is a scenario you don’t think will happen but could,” Cavanaugh said.

The worst-case plan is distributed on a limited basis to emergency officials and won’t be publicly released.

“We don’t want to show to the public things we don’t think are going to happen,” Cavanaugh said.

Among the workshop participants was Belinda Shook, in her 12th year as superintendent of the Beebe School District. She said the workshop was helpful in providing a broader picture of weather response management beyond her district, which has 3,400 students and 37 bus routes to cover its 230 square miles.

“It was good to hear discussion [among meteorologists] about how they think and how they go about issuing warnings and watches,” she said.

Any decision on closing schools in her district because of weather is hers alone.

“It’s a big deal when you have to close school,” Shook said. “It’s a bigger deal when you have to send them home early.”

She spends a lot of time monitoring weather reports on websites and social media, as well as talking to other superintendents before making a decision to close her schools. The safety of the district’s students is paramount, Shook said.

“It’s very stressful,” she said. “It’s one of the most stressful things you deal with as superintendent.”

She gets assistance from her students, noting that she sees a spike in followers on Twitter whenever a winter storm might be approaching.

But despite all the plethora of information that is available to Shook, she said the big test is to go out in the weather herself.

“If you drive on an overpass and do a 180 [spin], you won’t have school,” Shook said.

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