When Rare Events Happen -- Tornadoes in Massachusetts!

As my UMass colleague in Engineering and an expert on tornadoes, Dr. Stephen Frasier, said yesterday, as tornadoes swept Massachusetts, beginning with the western part, where we live, what happened was a pretty big system and was uncharacteristic. The terror and shock that many felt were definitely real during a surreal evening.

I was home, having left my office at UMass Amherst, and we were getting ready to pick up our daughter from Deerfield, about 12 miles from Amherst, where she has final exams this week. Propitiously, I checked one of our local news channels online only to see in big bold letters that there was a tornado warning for our area. Needless to say, we who live in western MA, pride ourselves on getting through grueling winters with blizzards and when tornadoes strike elsewhere say that, in New England, we don't have to deal directly with such extreme events -- until yesterday.

The weather reports late yesterday afternoon continued to warn us of extreme weather -- storms with lightning, high winds, and tornadoes over the next couple of hours and many TV programs were preempted.

I was reminded of Nassim Taleb's book, The Black Swan, on rare events. Taleb had held a faculty appointment in my department a few years back and worked with my Finance colleagues.

We called our daughter (thank goodness for cell phones in emergencies, cancer risks notwithstanding) and told her that she would be picked up a bit later. Ultimately, she made it home and then, after dinner, drove herself to skating (she is a competitive figure skater, among other sports that she truly loves) while her parents were glued to the TV (itself quite the rare event). A tornado had, indeed, struck the city of Springfield and West Springfield, about 4:30PM (and to add to the anxiety, only 24 hours before, my husband and daughter had been precisely in that general area getting her fitted for new figure skates). The black funnel cloud was shown on TV and then the images of the devastation and the people wandering around in shock, with trees downed, cars smashed, and our major medical center, Bay State, in "disaster" mode with emergency vehicles trying to reach people. There were power outages, gas leaks, and many workers were stuck in their offices and unable to get home plus a big truck was overturned on a major bridge and traffic was at a standstill.

As my daughter drove herself home from skating at the Mullins Center at UMass at around 8PM she noted that the sky had turned yellow and the sun had a pink aura. The sky in our neighboring towns of Hadley and Northampton had turned a greenish black.

The tornadoes continued eastward.

As for emergency notification, the UMass Amherst campus had sounded its emergency warning sirens throughout the late afternoon and my doctoral students had stayed in their lab, which is, luckily, in the basement (but it is gorgeous) of the Isenberg School. Since there was so much lightning our wired computers at home were off so we did not read the email warnings until the horrific evening was over.

Dr. Frasier, whom I have blogged about, since my husband worked with him and his radar research group while on sabbatical at UMass, does fantastic work with his research group in tracking tornadoes. However, typically, the tornadoes that they chase are hundreds of miles away from Massachusetts, in places where there is a ready occurrence of them, such as in Oklahoma. Also, Frasier said that he wasn't chasing tornadoes yesterday because it's typically too difficult because of the number of trees in the Amherst area.

You may view videos of our terrifying evening here.

When my daughter got back safely from skating she also was glued to the TV news and said that the images reminded her of Katrina.

Even The New York Times is reporting on the deaths and devastation and our Governor, Deval Patrick, has declared a state of emergency.

We have all acquired a greater sense and a much deeper appreciation of the power of nature after our experiences yesterday and understand, more than ever, what our fellow citizens in Tuscaloosa and Joplin have experienced.

More on the science behind forecasting tornadoes and networks of radars can be found here.

Even our senator, John Kerry, is calling what transpired a once in a hundred years weather event.

However, and, amazingly, although the Mass Mutual Center in Springfield was one of the evacuation centers, one of its rooms still was the venue for the Minnechaug High School prom yesterday (and my daughter confirmed that she had been receiving text messages yesterday evening that a friend of hers, through skating, was already there and had been driven by her parents).

A Network of Radars and the Science of Forecasting Tornadoes

The devastation in the South, and especially in Alabama, following the tornadoes this past week is horrifying.

According to CNN.com: By early this morning, emergency management officials tallied 252 deaths in Alabama, 34 in Tennessee, 33 in Mississippi, 15 in Georgia, 5 in Virginia and 1 in Arkansas. Since 1680, there has been only one other date in U.S. history on which more people died during a severe weather outbreak, according to weather experts, when on March 18, 1925, a severe storm system swept across seven states killing 747 people, according to the National Weather Service.

Immediately when I heard the news this past week, I contacted colleagues at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa (the tornado hit 5 miles from their home) and colleagues at the University of Alabama in Birmingham (they are OK, too). I was personally affected, even though located miles away, since my flights were cancelled on Thursday and I missed a memorial service and symposium at Cornell.

The media had been reporting that it was difficult to forecast such major weather events and I was thinking about the research that is being conducted by the NSF Engineering Research Center known as CASA, which is headed by UMass Amherst. CASA (which means "home" in Spanish) stands for the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere and this center is involved in the designing of technology, specifically, radars, and their placement in networks, to forecast major weather events, including tornadoes.

CASA's Director at UMass Amherst is Professor David McLaughlin (who is also now the Associate Dean of Engineering) and, would you believe, that almost on the same date (but a few years before the recent tornadoes in Alabama and 5 other states), McLaughlin spoke in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series?! His talk, Chasing Interdisciplinarity while Chasing Tornadoes: An Overview of the CASA Engineering Research Center was fantastic (and you can see his abstract and find more info here).

Lo and behold, now The New York Times is reporting on the research of CASA, which is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in a ten year project. The article notes how CASA is a collaboration among several universities with expertise in radars, weather forecasting, and focuses also on emergency preparedness and management. The other universities, in addition to UMass Amherst, are: the University of Oklahoma, Colorado State, and the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez.

Specifically, this group works on designing and building radars (my husband spent his sabbatical at CASA plus the researchers there I consider as colleagues) and setting them up as a network in order to predict weather more locally and quicker. Every year a group from UMass travels to the tornado-ridden areas to, literally, gather data while chasing tornadoes. The group includes students who drive the trucks with the radar gear in back, and, believe me, you should hear their "war" stories.

Of course, it is important to be able to produce the necessary radars in a cost efficient way so that they could be deployed on a scale to help.

Indeed, as The Times stated in the article:

Emergency managers said the radar network would provide more detailed pictures of smaller areas, and could have applications for traffic control and fire protection.

You can read more about chasing tornadoes in the VORTEX2 project here.

What a critical time now to get such radars deployed! Just imagine if the huge losses in terms of lives and property could have been avoided!