Forbes This week, we've talked about weather as an all-purpose excuse . As climate = long-term weather, the same thing applies.  You've probably read about the New Mexico wildfire that was set by the federal government and then got out of hand. Meteorologist Dr. Cliff Mass has an outstanding forensic analysis of the situation . Global warming had little to nothing to do with the fire.  As Cliff points out, had the government used modern meteorology, this would not have occurred. 

I love  Maggianos and I will guarantee to personally keep them in business if they will open a Wichita location. 

These are run by pro-life groups and are located across the nation. Recently, a number of them have been attacked. Below are two representative headlines.  We in the pro-life movement know we must provide resources to help eliminate the need for abortion and we are doing so. 

This man has had a bad year. A close call on April 29 in Andover    (above) and then yesterday's Amtrak crash.  Some serious thoughts: Yesterday was the second day in a row with a mass casualty Amtrak crash where a rural road crossed mainline tracks that requires drivers to turn their heads more than a 90° angle. I annotated a Daily Mail  illustration below.  Sunday's nearly identical crash was in California.  Rural or not, we need to get lights and gates at all mainline crossings where the road is not at a 90° angle to the tracks.  While the three crossing deaths in Missouri yesterday and the three in California were tragic and preventable, the human tragedy in Texas was far worse.  Fifty precious people died in that truck in Texas yet it is receiving far less coverage than the Amtrak accident. This is not acceptable. The border must be secured and we must stop human trafficking. 

This is yet another example of the Airline Lie pertaining to weather as we endure yet another day with hundreds of airline flights cancelled.  The 5:45p CDT weather map is a late June dream for the airlines.  I surmise this is occurring because the airlines have reached the end of the month and are out of employees that have sufficient "hours of service" left. Whether it is pilots, flight attendants or dispatchers, the Federal Aviation Administration has strict limits on sleep and on-duty hours that cannot be exceeded. Given how short-handed they are , I suspect this is the true reason.  It is appalling how little actual reporting news agencies do these days. Whatever the reason for all of the cancellations, it isn't bad weather. 

At current exchange rates, $98.14  to recharge your car! They did end up discounting it to $61.34.  After "cheaper" electric vehicle owners paid those fees, they got to hear Sir Paul McCartney on his 80th birthday and Greta Thunberg proclaiming: “The biosphere is not just changing, it is destabilising, breaking down… unfortunately, this is not the ‘new normal’. It will get worse until we manage to halt the constant destruction of our life-supporting systems, until we prioritise people and planet over profit and greed.” I dunno, but $100 bucks to charge an electric car sounds pretty profitable to me.  -- addition -- This is what the venue looked like after. Evidently, they didn't pay any addition to Greta's speech about the environment. 

Almost every city of any size has a pregnancy crisis center. Every one about which I am aware does amazing work to assist women keep their babies and raise them in good health and reasonable prosperity. Please donate whatever you can: it is the most important it has been in fifty years! My hope is the Dobbs decision, which struck down Roe and Casey,  is the beginning of a return to sanity in our nation 

Good for the Nation.  Good for our souls.  After a moment of jubilation, those of us in the pro-life movement must continue to do everything we can to assist women in crisis. We must help them raise their babies in good health and reasonable prosperity. We must recommit to assuring all children have a great education. 

It is bad enough that the Kansas Amendment's opponents are running a deceptive campaign, but their latest ad that implies the Catholic Church is on board with their pro-abortion stance is beyond the pale. The image below is a screen capture from their latest commercial. Here are the facts: The Kansas Supreme Court "found" that Kansas Constitution -- unlike the other 49 states' -- includes a "right" to abortion, even though abortion is not mentioned in the document.  The purpose of the August vote is simple: A YES vote amends the Constitution to so that the question of abortion goes back into the hands of the people of Kansas and our elected representatives. That's all! By itself, the amendment does not change abortion laws. I suspect polling tells the pro-abortion forces the amendment will pass (after all, a "yes" vote is pro -democracy) unless they lie, dissemble, and confuse the issue. So, they will lie if they must.  Vote YES on August 2!!...

From time-to-time people talk about a "green sky" with a tornado. This tornado, near I-70 earlier this evening, certainly qualifies.  And, thanks to storm chaser and photographer Freddie McKinnely for reporting the storm! It has been a busy evening in north central Kansas. 

I bring this to your attention because the potential exists for damaging thunderstorms in the area outlined in blue. In the words of the NWS Storm Prediction Center: I believe the tornado threat may be a bit more serious than stated above. Given that 80 mph winds are forecast to occur, there will be the possibility of power failures and tree damage. Please prepare accordingly. Also, please remember to take your phone and computers off their chargers the first time you hear thunder as the resulting power surges can damage them.  For later information please follow me on Twitter @usweatherexpert. 

I have uploaded a number of new photographs on my site at Adobe Stock Photography . Please head on over if you are in the market for commercial photography or just want to look at quality photos of outdoor subjects. 

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We've written many times about how hypocrisy is rife in the 'green' movement ( John Kerry's private jet travel , anyone?).  Now, it his close to home: Kansas. Per Kansas Representative Davids, congresspeople should not invest in companie s -- unless it is her and unless it is green energy.  Sheesh. 

The latest issue to interrupt the baby formula supply chain was a derecho which struck Sturgis, Michigan, on June 13. I tell the story here . 

Climate is long-term weather. Weather is what occurs day-to-day. More predictable than the weather is the Star  and (following along) the Wichita Eagle  hyping global warming. Especially when the meteorological science  clearly demonstrates the dead cattle did not die because of global warming.  While the summer heat is earlier than average in Kansas this year, that tells us nothing. Let's look at the real data, something the Star's editorial board didn't bother to do.  Here is a graph, from NOAA, of June's daily maximum temperatures in Sedgwick county (halfway between the two main cattle areas) from 1900 to 2021. There is a slight upward trend but it is ≤ 0.1° per decade. Nothing huge. In fact, if you throw out the extraordinarily cold June of 1903, there is no trend at all!   Now, let's focus on Wichita's June daily record highs from the National Weather Service office. These dates correspond to the duration of this year's heatwave.  Not a single rec...

I tell the story, here . Note that many of them are outside of "Tornado Alley." 

Happy Father's Day everyone!  I miss my Dad terribly and wish he was still with us.  Our society seems to completely devalue fathers.  Father's and their contribution to their families and, especially their children, are rarely appreciated in modern American society. Missing manly influence is one of the reasons so many of our boys seem lost. So, please wish your father and grandfathers a great day but -- more importantly -- love and appreciate them all the year around. 

Used to be the only temperature effect on human's was George Costanza's " shrinkage ." Now, The Guardian  has a ridiculous story that we are going to shrink because of global warming. Of course, if you read down to the bottom of the story, you find this: Lister is also skeptical that humans will shrink as the climate heats. “We are not really controlled by natural selection,” he said. “If that was going to happen, you’d need to find large people dying before they could reproduce because of climate warming. That is not happening in today’s world. We wear clothes, we have got heating, we have got air conditioning if it is too hot.” Must have been a really  slow news day. Or, more likely, Big Climate is so terrified it has lost the narrative that they'll throw anything against the wall to see if it sticks. 

“You have this new revisionism suggesting that we have to be pumping oil like crazy, and we have to be moving into long term [fossil fuel] infrastructure building, which would be absolutely disastrous,” Kerry said, speaking on June 7 at the  TIME 100 Summit  in New York City. “We have to push back, and we have to push back hard.” The entire story is here . 

Did an inch and a quarter of rain really cause this? When I saw this and other headlines about a flood and wind damage, I recalled Monday's derecho . While winds of 50 to perhaps 70 mph occurred in the area, I didn't recall any unusual rains. So, I did a little investigation. The derecho at 8:26pm EDT Below is an image from the South Bend National Weather Service (NWS) radar. It estimates rainfall with each scan. Its estimate was about 1.2 inches after the storm had moved out of the area. The NWS and University of Oklahoma developed a system that combines radar, rain gauges and data to create a more sophisticated rainfall amount estimate.  It displays an amount between 1.0 and 1.5 inches, which is consistent with the South Bend radar's estimate.  So, this may not be the full story: 'Severe thunderstorms and heavy rains came through southwestern Michigan on Monday evening, resulting in high winds, hail, power outages and flood damage throughout the area,' Abbott sai...

To answer the question in the title, all you have to do is look at the past and increase the numbers for population growth. Here is a list of the ten worst U.S. tornadoes in terms of deaths . With the exception of Joplin, all occurred without an advance tornado warning and most occurred outside of the traditional Tornado Alley.  With today's much greater population, these death tolls -- without warnings -- would be inflated that much more. That is why the tornado warning system is so very important. 

The brown area has a significant risk of tornadoes.  The red area has an enhanced risk of damaging thunderstorm winds (60 mph or stronger). The yellow area has a significant risk. 

You don't want to be issuing [a tornado warning] on every one of those little circulations...because you are going to be alerting upwards of a million people in the middle of the night.            -- Julie Adolphson, meteorologist-in-charge, National Weather Service, Kansas City   In 2010, when my book Warnings: The True Story of How Science Tamed the Weather was published, the United States had an excellent tornado warning system. Near the end of the book I wrote: From that inauspicious beginning involving spare World War II leftovers, we have developed an effective and highly cost-effective systems that saves lives and dollars, nearly every week. Here's to the first fifty years of storm warnings. May the next fifty be just as rewarding.  Unfortunately, things have deteriorated in ways I never would have imagined in 2010. Joplin Tornado. Photo by the Basehunters. The next year the Joplin Tornado occurred. It was, by far, the worst disa...

Saturday evening, in the Flint Hills of Kansas, was the stuff of every meteorologist's nightmares.  Picture: Ten thousand people in open rangeland with a tornadic thunderstorm, that also contained golfball-sized hail, and no way to escape or shelter in time as a shelf cloud (the leading edge of wind, rain and hail) approached from the north.  Photo by Paul Attwater The event is the wonderful Symphony in the Flint Hills . One of its special charms is that it occurs in the middle of nowhere -- amongst nature and cattle drives. But, that is also its unique danger: how do you evacuate ten thousand people in a short period of time? The tornado missed the site, but not by much. Below is a map showing the rotation track (pink arrow) with the blue color almost certainly indicating a tornado on the ground. The site is "S." Friends described their cars rocking in 60+mph winds as the hail came down. Some said they were "terrified." Clearly, event organizers waited too long...

Oy! While I reveal my age here, the fact is that I didn't have a single air conditioned classroom until I was in college; and even then it was probably half of them. Ironically, none of the meteorology classrooms at OU were air conditioned.  In the Great Plains and Midwest, one can get 100° days in late August and early September. Much of this problem could be solved is to go back to the "Labor Day to Memorial Day" schedules of 50 days ago. It will lessen the number of days with extreme heat.  Problem solved!

From my friends who were stuck in the Symphony in the Flint Hills'  pasture for two hours, this lightning video was taken at 10:18pm. They were driving south on US177.  Below are the rotation tracks to 10:30. There have been extreme winds in the Flint Hills region of Kansas as well as tornadoes near the Kansas - Nebraska border.  This data is as of 10:30pm.  Below is the rainfall map to 10pm. Unfortunately, Missouri has not been sending out real-time storm reports.  This is the end of my weather coverage for the evening.