2 Nights ago, I was at home and up late with our 2 year old son, playing and rough housing (as usual) and took a 2 year old’s forehead right on my left cheekbone.  On Wednesday morning, as I was preparing to leave to teach a class to the Alabama Emergency Response Course at the state’s Emergency Management HQ, I had someone look at me, and tell me I had a black eye.  I must have missed it in the mirror when I left home.  Looking at a mirror in the newsroom, I saw that I had the beginnings of a black eye.  4 hours later, as I was standing before 50 people in Clanton, teaching a class on Emergency Information and Media, telling a few jokes, and laughingly talking about my black eye.

Then, after taking care of Kyler all night and Thursday morning, I had a meeting with a major manufacturer in North Alabama, with members of our Sales and Marketing team, to discuss the importance of a WeatherCall partnership with them, when 5 minutes after my presentation, my phone rang with MY WeatherCall for a Severe Thunderstorm Warning at MY house in Hazel Green.  Perfect timing.  Suspicious timing, indeed, but perfect.  And NO I did not do that purposefully.  A good meeting.  I hope to present WeatherCall to businesses and schools all across the Tennessee Valley, and get it into the homes of tens of thousands of our neighbors.

Upon returning to the station, very heavy showers and thunderstorms wer emoving across the Tennessee Valley, giving WeatherCall another day to prove its amazing worth and usefulness.  Putting make-up on my black eye, the newscast came and went with the usual fanfare of severe thunderstorms, with another well-times call to my phone just before the 5pm weathercast, allowing me to hold my phone to the microphone and let people hear MY 3rd WeatherCall that afternoon.

So the end of 2 1/2 eventful days in my life came and went with my left eye none the worse for wear, and my phone busy with weather warnings, proving WeatherCall’s 100% performance.

Hot weather is on the way, so prepare yourself for next week.

 Brad Huffines, Chief Meteorologist / Storm Force 31

 Rains and Thunderstorms are in the forecast for Wednesday and Thursday as a weak cool front pushes into and potentially through the Tennessee Valley.  If the front hangs up in North Alabama, then the Jet Stream ’storm system’ that will follow this system back in may cause some very heavy rains and thundershowers that could potentially cause areas of flooding in especially flood prone areas.  If the front hangs up further south, then the upper system will still squeeze out moisture in the air in the form of more scattered showers and thunderstorms.

Then it Gets HOT.  HOT!  Yes, HOT!!  High temperatures next week will likely climb to and above 100 degrees for several days.  OUCH.  Hang in there.  Autumn is right around the corner.  Well, a VERY long corner.  Okay, nevermind, I was just trying to look on the bright side of life.

Check the 7-Day Forecast for Details!

Brad Huffines, Chief Meteorologist / Storm Force 31

Improve Your Personal Warning System with WeatherCall

Early this evening, there is another example how WeatherCall is the most advanced personal weather warning system available today.

While (well-meaning) television stations have been pressing you to purchase weather radios for years, saying that it is the only way to alert you to storms everytime, thousands of you who spent the money ON weather radios have now turned them off due to what I will refer to as Weather Radio fatigue.  Too many storms affecting OTHER parts of your county have made you eventually turn your weather radio OFF, which has placed you in the same jeopardy you were in before you bought the darned thing!

Technology NOW exists to warn YOUR ADDRESS or YOUR SPECIFIC LOCATION everytime the National Weather Service issues a Tornado Warning, a Severe Thunderstorm Warning, and a Flash Flood Warning, moreover, giving you the choice of which ones to receive and ignore.  ONLY WAAY-31 offers this service.  How much did you pay for your weather radio, you know, the one that sits in a drawer turned off?  $30?  $50?  $80?  $100.  WeatherCall only costs 58 cents per month for a yearly total of $6.95.  Each time your specific location is IN the NWS issued storm specific warning, I give you a call to up to 3 telephones (home phone and 2 cell phones for example) and send you an email message showing you the MAP of the warning to up to 3 email addressses!

Look at this example above.  This was a Severe Thunderstorm Warning issued July 28th, 2008, for a VERY small part of DeKalb County, AL.  Those with weather radios had them going off ALL over the ENTIRE county.  As you can see, approximately 1/10th of the county was under the warning.  WeatherCall would have only rung the phones and sent emails to the addresses registered within THAT WARNING BOX (or storm specific polygon) and that is it!  If this were a Tornado Warning in the middle of the night, your weather radio would have gotten you up in the middle of the night in 90% of the county UNAFFECTED by that storm.

Do you see the value and specificity of WeatherCall?  Please sign up for peace of mind, and the safety WeatherCall lends your family.  Make sure your school board knows about it.  The Huntsville City Schools now has WeatherCall for each school in the system.  The same should be true for ALL schools in the Tennessee Valley.

Brad Huffines, Chief Meteorologist / Storm Force31

Oh Yes It Can!!

I received a great email from a satisfied WeatherCall user this afternoon that I want to share with you.  His address was not found in the system, but with the ability to pinpoint your OWN address when you sign up, NO spot in the United States can hide from WeatherCall!  Please read the message below.

Hi Brad,

I signed up for WeatherCall, it is a great service. I was hesitant to sign up since I didn’t know if the system would be able to locate our house. Like a lot of people who live on farms, our house is located a long way from our main highway address. When the system did not locate our address, it gave me the opportunity to fix our location on a map and I was able to fix our house position 3/4 of a mile from the main road address. I suggest that you mention this capability to your audience since other people may have not signed up for the same reason that I was hesitant.

Thank you for writing!  Please keep the comments coming.  EVERYONE in the Tennessee Valley NEEDS this service.  Please tell your friends and neighbors about it and encourage them all to sign up!

If it weren’t for all of you, none of the members of WAAY-31’s Storm Force would be here.  Thank you for your business.  We will do our best never to let you down.

Brad Huffines, Chief Meteorologist / Storm Force 31

After a cool front actually made it past here early on Wednesday morning, lower humidities made our low to mid 90s feel fairly comfortable.  Low humidities will make our Friday morning feel fairly comfortable as well.  However, by Friday night and Saturday, you will feel the moisture stream back into the atmosphere with increased haze visible and increased moisture felt outside by your skin with increased heat indices.

So as temperatures rise, along with risen humidities, the heat index by the end of the weekend and into next week will likely climb to between 100 and 105.  That is hot and humid enough to come close to Heat Advisory standards of the National Weather Service. 

Bottom line:  Be careful next week in the heat.  Take this time to prepare for it and plan around it as you can next week.  Water, water, water. 

Drink plenty of it, and remember that the EPA controls the drinking water standards of our communities to a fairly high standard, and the FDA holds bottled water to a lower standard.  Now THAT comment alone should get people to respond to THIS blog!

Brad Huffines, Chief Meteorologist / Storm Force 31

With numerous severe thunderstorms across the Tennessee Valley, I have heard from a LOT of you with WeatherCall.  The technology does indeed work, and is VERY specific.  When the NWS issued a Severe T-storm Warning for Western and Central Madison County this afternoon, I received a call from someone who signed up with the WeatherCall service.  She asked why her phone did NOT ring, as she was in Huntsville, but lived in (or near) Toney, and had seen that there was a severe thunderstorm warning for that part of the county (that she had seen on a competitor’s television station) and wondered why she did not get call.  Upon asking her for her address, I looked at the western edge of the warning and saw that her address was 1/2 to 1 mile from the western edge of the storm warning.  Therefore, that 1/2 mile made a difference of being and NOT being called.  Meanwhile, NOAA weather radios went off all around the county, even when the storms were not affecting their areas specifically.

My point is that is how ACCURATE and POINT SPECIFIC WeatherCall is.  That is why YOU NEED it.  When a warned storm will affect your address, you will get a call from me, and if the warning does not affect your address, I will not bother you.  Many of you have gotten Weather Radio fatigue this afternoon.  With WeatherCall, you only get warned when YOUR SPECIFIC LOCATION is in the path of the warned thunderstorm.

EVERY one of the Huntsville City Schools are signed up for WeatherCall through the school system, and I encourage all school systems in the Tennessee Valley to sign up the each and every school for WeatherCall.  I also suggest that each family with children who are often sent home from school during severe weather to have WeatherCall at home, so your home would be called with each dangerous thunderstorm, and the parents’ cell phone could bve called as well to assure the safety of the thousands of children who are home alone.

Please forward this information to EVERYONE you KNOW.  It works in EVERY square inch of the United States, including (of course) every square inch of the Tennessee Valley.  If you do, it just might save a life.

Testimonial from Today’s Storms and WeatherCall

Hi Brad,

Just want you to know how great Weather Call works; I got my call today warning me that a severe thunderstorm was heading for the area my house is in.  The call came in plenty of time for me to “batten down the hatches”.  I can’t begin to tell you how safe that call made me feel; just knowing what was coming and what I might expect. 

When we moved down from NY and built this house, I insisted that I wanted a full basement AND an underground storm shelter, and of course we bought a weather radio.  With all that, I still had great anxiety when any kind of a storm was predicted, or if I heard the tornado sirens go off in the distance; I just never knew what was going to happen.  Now, I know; and this is the first time I really, really felt safe and I wasn’t in “panic mode”. 

Thanks so much for a great service, and for all the great work the weather team at WAAY does every day. 

Sincerely,

(Name Withheld), Hazel Green, AL

Brad Huffines, Chief Meteorologist / Storm Force 31

30 versus 50:  Is there REALLY a DIFFERENCE!?!?

To those who are extremely sensitive, YES.  SPF is the Sunscreen Protection Factor, and is a combination of chemicals that protect us from the sun and is best described by an article I found this afternoon at the Library of Congress website.

Sunscreen works by combining organic and inorganic active ingredients. Inorganic ingredients like zinc oxide or titanium oxide reflect or scatter ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Organic ingredients like octyl methoxycinnamate (OMC) or oxybenzone absorb UV radiation, dissipating it as heat. Some sunscreens protect us from the two types of damaging UV radiation: UV-A and UV-B. Both UV-A and UV-B cause sunburns and damaging effects such as skin cancer.

Ultraviolet radiation is broken into three types of wavelengths:

• UV-A: This is the longest wavelength and is not absorbed by the ozone. It penetrates the skin deeper than UV-B.
• UV-B: Responsible for sunburns. It is partially blocked by the ozone layer.
• UV-C: This is totally absorbed by the earth’s atmosphere; we encounter it only from artificial radiation sources.

When purchasing sunscreen, the Sun Protection Factor or SPF measures how effectively the sunscreen formula limits skin exposure to UV-B rays that burn the skin. The higher the SPF the more protection the sunscreen will provide against UV-B rays. SPF does not measure UV-A. If you are looking for UV-A protection, the experts recommend that you purchase a product that has broad-spectrum protection.

SPF is a reciprocal function: SPF 15 lets in 1/15 of the burning rays; SPF 30 lets in 1/30; and SPF 50 lets in 1/50. Therefore, the difference between SPF 30 and SPF 50 is only a difference of 97% effectiveness versus 98% effectiveness, according to a contributor to the Journal of the American Cancer Institute.

The most important thing to know about applying sunscreen is to reapply often, and use at LEAST SPF 30.  And yes, it is VERY important to make sure all of your skin is covered when you are out.  And lastly, start the kids off YOUNG in getting them used to using the stuff, and then they won’t look like a leather purse when they are our ages.

Brad Huffines, Chief Meteorologist / Storm Force 31

 A True Tropical Air Flow Pattern Heats Things Up

Very warm days this week with a slowly developing tropical-type low pressure system along the west coast of Florida will remain for the rest of the work week as we hope that low pressure area moves further west than is currently forecast.  In the tropical map below, you can see there are a few areas of concern.  Click on that image to go directly to the NHC’s web site.

If we don’t see the showers from the storm system in the Gulf, then we’ll only see hit and miss t-storms in the forecast.

Check out the 7-Day forecast for details

Brad Huffines, Chief Meteorologist / Storm Force 31

 Always Interesting to See What is Possible

Every day we live, something happens somewhere around us that is unique.  While we don’t always note it nor record it, history seems to be defined when it is.  One area in which the best records are kept is in the weather arena.  Numerous local offices of the National Weather Service, as well as countless community, city, regional and state newspapers record daily records of what happens in the world of weather.  Today’s blog is one quick glance of the weather events occuring on this date, recorded, and a part of our written history.

      1916 – A dying South Atlantic Coast storm produced torrential rains in the southern Appalachian Mountains. Altapass, NC, was drenched with more than 22 inches of rain, a 24 hour rainfall record for the state. Flooding resulted in considerable damage, particularly to railroads. (David Ludlum)

      1954 – The temperature at Balcony Falls, VA, soared to 110 degrees to establish a state record. (The Weather Channel)

       1983 – The Big Thompson Creek in Colorado flooded for the second time in seven years, claiming three lives, and filling the town of Estes Park with eight to ten feet of water. (The Weather Channel)

       1987 – Unseasonably cool weather spread into the south central and eastern U.S. Fifteen cities reported record low temperatures for the date, including Houghton Lake, MI, with a reading of 37 degrees. The high temperature for the date of 58 degrees at Flint, MI, was their coolest of record for July. Thunderstorms spawned several tornadoes in Illinois and Indiana, injuring a cow near Donovan, IL. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)

      1988 – Twenty-six cities east of the Mississippi River reported record high temperatures for the date. Charleston, WV, established an all-time record high with a reading of 103 degrees, and Chicago, IL, reported a record fifth day of 100 degree heat for the year. A severe thunderstorm moving across Omaha, NE, and the Council Bluffs area of west central Iowa spawned three tornadoes which injured 88 persons, and also produced high winds which injured 18 others. Winds at the Omaha Eppley Airport reached 92 mph. Damage from the storm was estimated at 43 million dollars. (Storm Data) (The National Weather Summary)

       1989 – Thunderstorms drenched Kansas City, MO, with 4.16 inches of rain, a record for the date. Two and a half inches of rain deluged the city between Noon and 1 PM. Afternoon thunderstorms in South Carolina deluged Williamstown with six inches of rain in ninety minutes, including four inches in little more than half an hour. (The National Weather Summary)(Storm Data)

Brad Huffines, Chief Meteorologist / Storm Force 31