Severe Thunderstorm Warning

[Big Frank]

There's a Severe Thunderstorm Warning here. It should hit my house at about 5 pm, in 10 minutes, and it's only until 545 PM There are 60 mph wind gusts and penny size hail a little bit north of me. It's nice out right now, if you like 90 degree heat, which I don't. But if you don't like the weather in Michigan, stick around a few minutes. It'll change. I don't recall any tornado watches or warnings this summer, but 60 mph winds can do a lot of damage.

[Big Frank]

It's raining good now. The temperate went up just a few degrees, but it feels like it's 98 degrees.

[Big Frank]

There were more twigs and stuff than usual when I mowed the front yard today. Otherwise it doesn't look like there was a big storm lately. I don't have any trees in my yard but I always have leaves and twigs and stuff. There were a few pieces of tar paper in my driveway that I don't know where they came from. There's a pile of shingles and junk in the backyard  next to me so I threw it over there.

[alfsauve]

Glad it wasn't anything more.

Two stories this month, one of course about the yacht in the Mediterranean  being violently sunk by a storm,  possibly a water spout.

The other has to do with a USAF C-141 flying out of NJ to the UK back in 1976.  Unfortunately the plane's weather radar wasn't functioning.  (Remember this was 1976, pulling up weather radar pictures remotely was unheard of and the ability of remote air traffic to call weather not quite as advanced as today.)   Why the pilot would sign off a Red X, a non-flyable, item for a trans-Atlantic flight has not been made clear.   The plane ran into a violent imbedded cell (possible what we now call a micro cell) in a cloud bank which literally ripped the plane apart mid-air.  All aboard perished.    I remember this because it was a bird I had worked on when I was in.

[Big Frank]

To misquote the old Chiffon margarine ads of half a century ago, it's not wise to fool with mother nature.

I know that's not the plane that flew me from Germany to the U.S. unless they recovered the pieces and assembled them like a jigsaw puzzle.

[Sponsor]

[Big Frank]

It's still tornado season. They test all the warning sirens the first Saturday of the month during the whole season, which is the majority of the year outside of winter. There was an F5 tornado before my time in 1953 that people were still talking about 20 or 30 years later whenever another tornado hit. It doesn't get any worse than an F5. The highest winds were over 261 mph (420 km/h). I'm sure I've mentioned it before. I'm a little bit surprised that we've only had a few bad thunderstorms this summer and no tornadoes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Flint%E2%80%93Beecher_tornado

[Big Frank]

We had more severe thunderstorm warnings last week and it was nothing much. Unusually, it didn't rain at all the 5 days I was up north. When it rains up there, it's almost always a gully washer that lasts all day or all night. But it was so dry the sign at the DNR station said EXTREME FIRE HAZARD. It makes riding less fun when it gets that dusty and you're following someone, but it was beautiful weather the whole time.