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Scott Lurndal

Jim Joyce writes:
On Fri, 14 Aug 2020 13:37:32 -0500, Dean Hoffman
wrote:

On 8/14/20 1:32 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 14 Aug 2020 07:09:17 -0700 (PDT), Cindy Hamilton
wrote:

On Thursday, August 13, 2020 at 8:27:35 PM UTC-4, Dean Hoffman wrote:
About a third of Iowa's crops are damaged.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/derecho-iowa-crop-land-farmland-midwest-damage-severe-weather-corn-soybean-disaster-10-million
Farmers have insurance but now they can argue with the insurance
companies.
More pictures from the Des Moines Register.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/weather/2020/08/10/derecho-storm-iowa-city-damage-power-outage/3338604001/
This storm has an unusual name, derecho. It was a straight wind, not
tornadoes, that did this.

Yes, the name is unusual. They've been using it in the popular press for--what?--20 years, perhaps. But meteorologists have been using it for much
longer than that. Like the polar vortex, the scientific term was slow to
make it to the newspapers.

I recall one that came through Ann Arbor in the late 70s or early 80s.
That was an oddball; they usually stay below the Great Lakes.

Cindy Hamilton

The news people along with a few meteorologists seem to me making up
names these days for damned near anything.

Fancy words are an attempt to make up for the fact that the best
they can do is say it might rain today.

I've been lucky. I've lived in over a dozen places in this country and I've
never lived anywhere that they couldn't forecast the weather for the next 3
days or so. It gets a bit sketchy when they try to go out to 10 days or
even more.

With the modern ECMWF, NAM and GFS forecasts, ten days out has gotten
much better than just five years ago. It's not perfect, given the chaotic
systems involved it may never be, but it's pretty damned good.