Technology and balloons helped Arkansas forecasters give advance warning of March storms

Meteorologists predicted the volatile weather that hit Arkansas on March 14 at least five days in advance by using sophisticated equipment and advanced forecasting techniques, surpassing their normal two-day warning of potential tornadic activity.

Those advancements may soon be throttled, however, as budget cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration could strip National Weather Service stations of needed meteorologists, cut funding for research and upgrades in equipment and eliminate educational outreach programs such as storm spotter training classes.

Under President Donald Trump’s administration, his Department of Government Efficiency has called for slashing NOAA’s $6.8 billion budget by up to 20 percent and either laying off employees or not filling positions vacated by transfers or retirement.

Already, 1,300 were laid off at the country’s 122 National Weather Service stations in February. Another 1,000 people may soon lose jobs in the near future.

Five stations in North Little Rock; Memphis; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Shreveport, Louisiana; and Vicksburg, Mississippi, monitor weather conditions in Arkansas.

“We consider ourselves a public safety institution,” said Dennis Cavanaugh, the warning coordinator for the National Weather Service’s North Little Rock station. “We provide a place for the public to go for information about the weather. “

Cavanaugh wouldn’t comment much further, saying his office doesn’t get into politics.

“I can say if we have more cuts, it will make it tougher to cover events like the [March 14] one,” he said.

Just recently, stations in Omaha, and Rapid City, South Dakota, suspended the launching of weather balloons because of cost, according to The Associated Press. Stations in Albany, New York, and Gray, Maine, recently quit sending their balloons skyward also. Weather Service balloons, which contain GPS tracking and a radio for transmitting data, cost about $350 each.

Weather balloons launched by the North Little Rock station are what alerted meteorologists to increase the March 14 warnings in Arkansas.

The Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, a division of NOAA, predicted on March 9 that meteorological elements would combine — cold air from the north, desert winds from the west and humid Gulf moisture — to create the potential for storms.

Normally, the center issues its daily convective outlook report and indicates anything more than two days in advance is difficult to forecast.

This time, though, the outlook gave a week’s warning, placing northeast Arkansas in the “moderate” level. The center rates potential storm chances on a five-level scale. The first, the least dangerous, is “marginal.” The highest ranking is “high.”

The pre-March 14 ranking of “moderate” was the fourth highest level for storm potential.

For most of the week, Jonesboro and Memphis were in the area’s ‘bull’s-eye’ for the worst possibility for storms. Early on March 14, though, the area was moved slightly northeast into eastern Missouri and west central Illinois.

“It was a really big storm system that we had been tracking by satellite all week,” Cavanaugh said. “Most of the models showed it was packing incredibly strong winds.

“We knew this one had extreme wind energy,” he said.

Meteorologists continued monitoring the system as it trekked through Nebraska and dipped down into Oklahoma and then Arkansas that afternoon.

Cavanaugh said his station’s meteorologists launched several weather balloons that day to record air temperatures aloft. He wanted to determine if the “cap was breaking,” referring to an upper level of warm air that forms and saps energy from any potential storms. If the cap breaks, cold air rushes in and creates the turbulent supercells that could spawn tornadoes.

At 1:30 p.m. on March 14, Cavanaugh saw the cap had broken over Arkansas. He immediately issued a tornado watch for much of the state.

“When I saw what was happening, I told our meteorologist on duty that night that this had the potential to be a career-defining night,” he said.

In Jonesboro, county officials prepared to open its safe room in the recently finished new courthouse annex in downtown. The building, which houses additional courtrooms and a quorum court chambers, officially opened earlier in the month.

The safe room — the only one in the state maintained by a county government — can withstand winds of up to 250 miles per hour and can hold nearly 600 people.

Craighead County administrator Brandon Shrader said the county opened the safe room at 7:30 p.m. well before storms began rolling in.

“About 75 came in,” he said. “Then when storms began hitting around, we started seeing more.”

By the time an EF-4 tornado hit Diaz, a Jackson County town about 5 miles southwest of Jonesboro, there were 207 inside the Craighead County safe room.

The people crowded in and waited for the storms, watching storm coverage on KAIT, the local ABC-television affiliate, on three large screens mounted on the room’s walls.

The more violent storms hit Jonesboro at about 11:30 p.m. There were no tornadoes, though the weather service did report there were at least four twisters within about 20 miles of the city that night. Torrential rains, 60 mph winds and hail peppered the area for a while. Radar did indicate rotation, indicative of the formation of a tornado, over the NEA Baptist Hospital and near Brookland to the northeast of Jonesboro.

“We knew it was coming,” said Craighead County Office of Emergency Management director Anthony Coy. “We had a four-hour advance warning, but we didn’t expect that many people to come to the safe room though.”

Shrader said people called his office the following week to thank the county for providing the shelter. He said one person suffering from “storm anxiety” after riding out a devastating tornado in Jonesboro in 1968 was appreciative of the shelter.

Coy added that a March 2020 tornado that hit Jonesboro also created a higher level of awareness among residents.

“We know what to do,” Coy said. “Our safe room will provide more safety than what we had before.”

He also credited the advance warning meteorologists gave. Three people did die in a tornado in Cushman just north of Batesville, but he thought more people were aware of the impending storms than had been in previous storms.

The National Weather Service was even able to rate the tornado that hit Cave City as an EF-3 twister with winds of up to 165 miles per hour before survey teams inspected damage.

Cavanaugh said advances in radar — mainly in the dual-polarization Doppler radar — were able to determine how high debris was lifted into the air in the tornado’s path and how large the debris was to get an idea of the twister’s wind speeds.

Storm survey teams still went out in the week after March 14 and determined 15 tornadoes hit the state that evening.

Four days after a twister hit The Enclave, a high-end subdivision in southwestern Paragould, a man pushed a baby stroller along South 30th Street. He didn’t give his name, but said he knew a tornado was headed toward his neighborhood.

“We had plenty of time to get ready,” he said. “We knew bad weather was coming and we watched the coverage on [KAIT] as it came in.”

His family hunkered down in their storm shelter and waited. The winds spared their home, but scores of others just west of his were damaged. He said he was thankful for the advance warning.

The potential for cuts has weather officials worried those warnings may not be as advanced in the future.

Coy, who still second-guesses decisions he made in the wake of the sudden March 2020 tornado that hit Jonesboro, said he was anticipating even earlier storm detection methods in the future.

Advances in artificial intelligence could help forecasters, he said.

“They are incorporating AI in storm models now,” he said. “It can learn from data fed into it and could eventually provide even more lead time.

“But the National Weather Service was a strapped agency to begin with,” Coy added. “I don’t think the cuts will totally impact safety, but it could cut SkyWarn classes to teach spotters how to detect possible tornadoes, and it will cut the public services they produce.”

Under the Trump administration’s plans, the National Weather Service would function more as a “data-gathering” agency while private companies such as AccuWeather would issue public notices such as storm warnings.

During his previous administration, Trump nominated Barry Myers, the former CEO of AccuWeather, to lead NOAA. After two years of failed confirmation hearings, Myers withdrew from consideration in 2019.

Meteorologists also remember in 2019 the “Sharpiegate,” episode when Trump ignored Weather Service warnings for a hurricane headed for the Gulf coast. Trump used a Sharpie pen to draw on a map of the country an area for potential damage from Hurricane Dorian and included Alabama. Weather service meteorologists said that was not true and issued a public statement refuting Trump’s predictions after receiving scores of calls.

“You can’t totally replace the National Weather Service,” Coy said. “But these cuts will hurt the things that you don’t see. It will impact infrastructural upgrades that could even better improve radar and give us even more warnings.”

Cavanaugh said the March 14 storms were the first of the spring season in Arkansas. While forecasters shun away from long-range weather predictions because of the ever-constant atmospheric changes, he said early models do indicate this spring and summer could see a higher than average potential for more bad storms.