Wichita meteorologists excel at hurricane forecasting. They practiced with tornadoes

Guy Pearson’s used to the reactions by now.

They’re pretty much inevitable whenever AccuWeather clients learn a key piece of the private forecasting service’s hurricane forecasting operation is located nowhere near an ocean.

It’s in Kansas, smack dab in the center of the country, where remnants of hurricanes and tropical storms rarely visit.

“Yeah, really?” people often say, as if it’s a joke, said Pearson, a senior meteorologist and director of weather warning services for AccuWeather.

Then comes, “How do you do that?”

But handling hurricane forecasts out of AccuWeather’s Wichita branch makes great sense when you dig deeper, said Jonathan Porter, vice president and general manager of AccuWeather for Business.

Wichita is home to AccuWeather’s Severe Weather Center, where a team of meteorologists keep an eye out for violent weather around the globe.

“We have a special focus in Wichita on tornado prediction and warning,” Porter said.

That’s fitting, since Kansas is in the heart of Tornado Alley. But AccuWeather officials recognized that the expertise the Wichita team has developed in forecasting tornadoes can be utilized in other ways. The supercell thunderstorms that typically produce tornadoes are also capable of large hail, heavy rain and damaging winds.

“They have special expertise on things like ‘Where’s the heaviest rainfall likely going to set up?’” as well as other impacts of a hurricane, such as storm surge and coastal inundation, Porter said.

AccuWeather’s proprietary SmartWarn system allows forecasters to get a highly detailed look inside thunderstorms to see what they’re capable of, Porter said. SmartWarn was originally developed by Wichita-born WeatherData, which was acquired by AccuWeather in 2006.

“I kind of liken it to our meteorologists taking an MRI of thunderstorms,” Porter said. “They’re looking at all the different levels in the atmosphere, and diagnosing which of these storms may produce a tornado, which of them may produce damaging wind gusts - things that others might miss.

“That’s what we’re specifically tuned into and looking at, and that makes all the difference in terms of being able to accurately warn our customers way in advance” of the severe weather striking a specific point, he said.

“They’ve got to make big, big decisions” on whether to shut down operations because of approaching severe weather, Porter said.

Some clients need much more time to execute a shutdown than others, he said. One shutdown can cost some businesses a million dollars by the time lost production, equipment clean-up and restarting are factored in.

While a hurricane’s track and rating get the most public attention – the Saffir-Simpson Scale used for decades rates hurricane strength based on maximum sustained winds – weather officials have begun measuring hurricane impacts in new ways.

“It’s so much more than just ‘OK, where’s the track? Where’s it going?’” Porter said. “It’s all of the impacts.”

With that in mind, AccuWeather debuted its own hurricane rating system, called the RealImpact Scale, two years ago to help people understand the full capabilities of a given hurricane.

The six-point scale factors in flooding rains, high winds, storm surge and the economic impact of a storm.

Hurricane Sandy in 2012 demonstrated the need for a better way to measure the impact of hurricanes, Pearson said. Though it was “only” a Category 2 hurricane by the time it reached the U.S. mainland, it wreaked havoc all along the Eastern Seaboard with its torrential rains and storm surge.

Porter said a “man-on-the-street” interview with a resident of North Carolina who said he wasn’t worried about Hurricane Florence because it had been downgraded to a Category 1 left him with his head in his hands.

He was next to be interviewed by CNN and said, “We’re talking about a storm that is going to be producing 35-plus inches of rain over a multi-day period. Don’t react to this as you would a Category 1 storm that comes in and goes out.”

Cristobal, which came ashore in Louisiana on June 1, is a fresh example of why labels can be misleading, weather officials say. Though it was classified as a tropical storm, its remnants produced violent weather and substantial rainfall all the way into Canada.

Two children were killed in Louisiana, a number of tornadoes were spawned – including one that went through downtown Orlando in Florida – flooding rains tracked north and storms knocked out power to thousands of residents in Canada.

Cristobal is the earliest third named storm in the North Atlantic on record and as a post-tropical storm went farther north and west than any on record in the continent.

Cristobal was well east of Kansas as it pushed north. Only five named tropical systems have struck Kansas since 1900 – which is why many are surprised to learn a key cog in AccuWeather’s hurricane forecasting is in Wichita.

“The Severe Weather Center in Wichita has been busier than ever” this spring and early summer, Porter said, in part because of the early start to hurricane season.

The center has a staff of more than 40 meteorologists and support staff offering around-the-clock forecasts. As Cristobal churned north through the U.S., forecasters at the Wichita office held more than 50 conference calls with clients to discuss the track and likely impacts, Pearson said.

The center also has been providing forecasts for about 500 hospitals that have set up special outdoor tents for testing and treating COVID-19 patients.

“We realized very quickly that we could support those health care heroes and the people on the frontlines of combating COVID-19 by donating our service to those facilities that were interested in having us watch for weather risks that might affect their hospital,” Porter said.

Because tents are far more vulnerable to severe weather than more permanent structures – and also because of the risks involved with handling COVID-19 patients – hospitals needed more time to respond in the event of approaching severe weather.

“The feedback has been phenomenal from those users, and they’re getting advanced warnings of tornadoes, lightning and wind gusts of 45 miles per hour, which is enough to cause problems” for tents, he said.

Hospitals in the northeastern U.S. even had to deal with late spring snows that weighed down tents.

Those snow storms serve as a fresh reminder, Pearson said, that people should be prepared for almost anything from Mother Nature.

Tornadoes can happen pretty much anywhere in the world during certain times of the year, he said. That’s why his AccuWeather team gets so much practice forecasting tornadoes.

“You really have to be prepared for severe weather year-round, especially east of the Rockies,” Pearson said.

It’s not about the calendar, he said, “it all about having the right meteorological conditions.”

This story was originally published June 29, 2020 at 5:01 AM.