8.21.12 Shipping Off to Boston! - FOX44 - Burlington / Plattsburgh News, Weather & Sports

8.21.12 Shipping Off to Boston!

Wednesday Chief Meteorologist Kerrin Jeromin and myself will be speaking at a weather conference in Boston! Speaking for myself I'm ecstatic to go and very happy to be invited to this particular conference. I assume I can say the same for her too.

This past winter I had an e-mail in my inbox from a fellow AMS member (American Meteorological Society) asking if all or some of our weather team could provide a presentation about the wild weather in our area in 2011.  After some back and forth e-mails with the gentleman, who apparently is a TV meteorologist in Washington state, we came to the conclusion to discuss Tropical Storm Irene.

Like I said just above, I'm very happy to do so! Kerrin and I worked the whole Irene storm from the morning until the evening that day as it swept through our neck of the woods in about 12-15 hours.  Meanwhile Nick Johnston was attempting to do remote live shots from Rutland, Vermont and if he was still working at our station now he'd probably be going to Boston as well. 

So our presentation is all set to go and before I know it, it will be all over and done with. But I'm not rushing things!  We're one of the first speakers at this three-day conference that focused for broadcasters. Our standpoint with the Irene presentation is to wrap up the pre-storm, during, post-storm, effects, broadcast role, and even a little more...all in 15 minutes! I think we can do it, or I guess we'll have to once they cut our microphones.

Since this is a broadcast conference there will be a focus on the broadcast side of Irene. This will include our forecasts leading up to the event, when we realized the storm was really getting bad, how we communicated our expectations, and how to improve for future events.  I think Irene was a huge learning experience for so many folks. My heart goes out to the people who were, and still are, affected by the storm.

Here are some quick and dirty bullet points to the presentation we'll make at the conference:

• Irene forecast track was very accurate when it was still four days away from us.
• Our forecast called for a widespread 4-7 inches of rain and locally up to 8. We expected very bad flooding but the result was worse than I personally anticipated.
• The soil was very, very wet leading up to the event. We had the wettest March/April on record and third-snowiest winter. This worsened the flooding.
• It was tough to override the presence of national media as the storm moved north up the coast. As the storm hit North Carolina and New York City and the result wasn't that bad, so we had to keep stressing the severity of it here.
• In 1999 Tropical Storm Floyd hit our area and dumped more rain on us than Irene, but the results weren't nearly as bad. 
• In the future I want to put less stress on terms like flash flood warning and watch and advisory and tell folks the bottom line what to expect, when, where, how bad, to the best of my ability. The terminology can get confusing at times!

I'll type something up once we get back explaining how the conference went.  Again we're fortunate to share our experience regarding a huge event. We will definitely learn what other broadcasters have done in big events in their area and use it to our advantage, by always getting better at what we do every day! Or trying to at least :)

-Meteorologist Steve Glazier