Reading the Sky

 The atmosphere is fickle and complex, more so than a lot of people understand. In fact, the public at large is extremely ignorant of what the sky does and why. I'm not sure I can pinpoint the event, if there is a specific one, that made me keen on learning about weather. When I was very young I had nightmares about tornadoes. They were a monster in those dreams, a living breathing thing that had intention and direct malice. Those dreams were colored by imagery I was seeing in bits and pieces in media on the May 3rd, 1999 Bridge Creek-Moore Oklahoma F5. At the time, that was the penultimate tornado, and it was a terrifying one. A video clip of mud and debris splattering on a car's windshield far outside the black, rolling mass of the tornado itself were ingrained in my memory though I couldn't have been more than four or five at the time I saw them on the television. Not many years later, I saw hail for the first time. The core of a supercell thunderstorm passed over our home in Western Pennsylvania, dropping enough dine to quarter sized stones to coat the ground. That was impactful, not singularly, but it definitely encouraged curiosity.

Years later, I was on the bus to school in the winter, now living in central Connecticut. It was sleeting, and the small ice pellets  made light "tick" sounds as they hit the windows. I had entered my weather nerd stage by then, and knew that these frozen droplets were formed as snowflakes partially melted in a warm layer of air, then re-froze into hard pellets in a cold layer on their way down. But the other kids on the bus were calling it hail. I tried to explain that hail was a warm season phenomena and much bigger than this but it fell on deaf ears. As I grew up I'd become continually more aware just how weather ignorant most people are. It baffled me, because weather impacts everything we do, and with just a cursory knowledge of cloud structure and a good set of observational skills and feel I was making short term forecasts that were pretty accurate while adults in charge were getting caught offgaurd by thunderstorms. Being weather ignorant is fine, until it isn't. Until their life is in danger. And it doesn't take a monster tornado for weather to kill you.

On a warm, calm evening in June I was on my way to the shoreline with the canoe racked up to meet John. Our goal was going to be to put a good sized striper in the boat, and I'd been on a school of cows for a few days. But there was a catch, a catch in the form of a thin green line on radar. 

Doppler radar works by bouncing radio waves off of particles in the atmosphere and measuring the phase shift, which in terms of waveform means the displacement of a waveform in time. By measuring the waveform, radar can determine the speed and direction a particle in the atmosphere is traveling, and by measuring the strength of the reflected radio wave the radar can determine the size and quantity of particulate. This particulate could be a tiny snowflake, a fat hailstone, or even a chunk of a house, in the terms of the things storms might put in the air. It can also be insects, smoke, or airplanes. That gives us an awful lot of information to go off of. and to my slightly trained eye, that thin, broken green line told me a lot. With limited reflectivity (light green rather than yellow, orange, red, or purple. radar reflectivity is measured in dBZ, or decibals relative to Z- the measure of the strength of the returning beam. Low dBZ is represented by blues and greens, high by reds and purples.) I could tell there wasn't much if any precipitation reaching the ground along most of the line. Rather, the radar was picking up a dense but thin line of clouds with small embeded cells. They were moving quickly though and so was the wind pushing them, evidenced both by their speed on the radar and the bright green when I switched from the reflectivity product to the velocity product. This radar imagery was a classic example of a strong outflow boundary or gust front. when storms expel cold air, it hits the ground and spreads out, often creating an arcing line of cold outflow wind. This can sometimes persist for hours, even after the storm is gone. The storm that made this wind was long gone and not visible. I could see the shallow, puffy line of clouds out my window though and it confirmed my forecast. 

When I met John I told him "This might be short lived, but we'll give it a shot". Though it was nearly dead calm where we were, I knew it wouldn't remain so. The line of advancing cumulus clouds was visible to the west. "It's going to get windy when this gust front comes over us". 

I wasn't worried because I knew the wind direction and knew that it would just blow the boat back to the beach we were launching from. I also knew John could handle the minor discomfort of a choppy trip back, this was far from his first time in my canoe either.  But if it had been any other client I wouldn't have even left the house. I knew my boat, knew the location, and knew I could keep us safe, but I also knew there was a fair shot it wouldn't be all that fun and that we'd get very little fishing time. John wouldn't care as long as there was a brief shot at a big bass, but it sure wouldn't make a good trip for most paying clients. If it had been another launching location  the story could be quite a bit different, and I could picturw someone getting themselves in quite a bit of trouble on a small paddle craft, or even an overloaded aluminum motorboat or smaller sailing vessel. We got out to our position, John fished for a bit, and the gust front came over. The change in conditions wasn't gradual. It went from blowing less than 5kts to over 20kts in a matter of about 60 seconds. We could hear the wind coming before we felt it. I pulled the anchor and calmly pointed the bow shore-ward, allowing the wind to carry us but fighting tide that wanted to pull us Southeast beyond my preferred landing point. We made it to shore, pulled the boat up, and looked at each other each wearing a face that said "that was gnarly". 

Had we been along a shoreline facing a different direction, in the same vessel, and unaware that the gust front was coming, that could have been extremely inconvenient at best and dangerous at worst. Knowing how to read the sky and radar and being conscious of the surroundings and our limitations kept us safe. You hear, from time to time, about small boats getting into serious trouble, often weather related. People die because they don't know how to interpret the weather, and the more time you spend outdoors, especially on open water, the more of a risk that is. Don't be a statistic. Learn the weather. 

Happy holidays everyone, I hope you are all in good health and spirits. Thank you all. 

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