Weathertainers

This past week, all kinds of speculation was made about this past Tuesday.  The first I heard about it was from a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in my orchestra.  He said there was severe weather projected for the night of our concert:  Tuesday. Most likely there would be a little hail and some rain.  He said we’ll have a plan in place, but don’t believe all of the weather guys on tv.  They’ll be making a big fuss and show over it, but it’s likely that very little will happen at all.

This seemed like sound advice to me.  As the day approached, I began to look at my regular weather forecasts on The Weather Channel and Accuweather.  Here’s what Accuweather had to say.

After midnight, it predicted some severe weather.  Meanwhile our local guys were saying grapefruit-sized hail and numerous tornadoes staring at 6pm. When I came home Tuesday night, my family was watching a particularly histrionic weather person.  Let’s call him Mitch Morland.  He was raising a fuss like only an Oklahoma TV weatherman can.  I yelled at everybody to shut it off.  I was a little miffed that my concert was cancelled because of this nonsense.  But as the storm approached, I could see my family’s anxiety rise and I turned it on, and the show began.

Mitch Morland is impressive.  Truly.  He can hold my attention for hours with his mesmerizing technology and dramatics.  And the words!  In the past, he’s used words like wrapping up, tightening up, hook echo, in flow, rain curtains,lowering, scud, power flashes, multiple vortices, rain-wrapped, but I heard very few of these words.  He didn’t use them because he didn’t need them.  There were no tornadoes. And so he down-shifted into words that we were not used to hearing.   Gustnado, spinning wind, wind event, and F0-Tornado.  The F scale has always been from 1-5 in my experience.  The word for it is Gustnado.  It’s basically high winds that has some spin to it.  These are words used by folks like Mitch Morland to make it seem necessary to continue to broadcast and make a fuss.  It’s a way to cover up the fact that they were dead wrong.  Gustnado isn’t exactly a new word, it turns out.  Accuweather has a definition dated 2011

A gustnado is a short-lived, ground-based swirling wind that can form on the leading edge of a severe thunderstorm. Although the name comes from “gust front of a tornado,” and a gustnado almost looks like a tornado, it is not considered to be one.May 14, 2011

Working for the tech industry and the government I’ve heard my fair share of buzz words, and I know how they start.  A creative person says something in a presentation, and all of the less creative people start using it.  So who invented gustnado?  I’m reminded of a bunch of guys at a bar coming up with new silly names and phrases and trying them out with each other for laughs.  And boy did he try them out.

Wind event.  Ok, guys.  We all know what that is.  That’s what you call the weather when not a single prediction about the tornadoes comes true.  He played it up big time.  He tried to make it news.  He told us to stay away from our windows and move to the center of the house.  He said it about 6 times in 5 minutes, each time making a going-to-the-middle gesture with both hands.

Even as the hail was arriving in Norman, they were calling for baseball-sized hail.  We got penny-sized at the most, much to my relief.  Then I could see the desperation.  Mitch had to try to prove that all of his fancy software and equipment was worth something and that he was interrupting our programs for something.  He pointed to a blob on the map and starting make a right fuss.  Then he said, “That is a tornado.  That is a tornado.  That right there, folks, is a tornado.  I’m telling you right now.”  One minute later a guy off screen said it was a gustnado.  Mitch’s energy dropped a little.  Here they requisitioned this word I’d never heard before to keep us excited when there wasn’t actually a tornado, and now that’s all he could see all night.

And these guys get excited when there finally is a tornado, but it doesn’t seem like it’s for the benefit of safety.  There is a glee.  A zeal.  A mania.  Please excuse me for this explicit language, but it’s the only way to describe the overwhelmingly male phenomena. We’re talking a raging tornado erection.  A torboner.   People who track tornadoes can’t really help it, though.  It’s what they live for.  It’s like finally finding the lion on an African safari.  But never mind the fact that that tornado might mean the death of somebody.  Throw some cold water on it weathertainers.

Look, I know there’s no way to be certain of what will happen.  I know it’s better safe than sorry. I know that tv broadcasts have saved lives.  But I also know that these “wind events” and gustnados boost ratings.  It’s the one time a year when we put down our streaming services and actually watch one of the local networks broadcast live.  This is the big show.  This is what Mitch Morland and Navin Playne get paid the big bucks to do.  It’s good tv.  But is it really necessary?  I think of the time I wasted instead of looking at the national weather forecasts, or this tweet from Gary England.

Then, a weather app could do the rest.  In the end, Norman had some rain and very small hail and then it was over. There was damage around Oklahoma, one guy in Davis lost his roof.  That is what a wind event can do.  And I acknowledge that they’re not always wrong; on the contrary, I’ve seen them be dead on, but does it do any good to make such a fuss and alarm everyone?  They profit in ratings from our fear and hysteria.   Don’t we have enough stress in our lives to have someone manufacture some for us?  It depends on want you want.  Do you want weather updates or weathertainment.