After the deluge here in Seattle on Saturday (I walked downtown in the afternoon and ended up wringing water out of my cuffs at happy hour), sun on Sunday, and more deluge yesterday, now the National Weather Service is shouting about this:

…STRONG THUNDERSTORMS ARE POSSIBLE ACROSS THE LOWLANDS OF WESTERN WASHINGTON TODAY…

A DISTURBANCE MOVING AROUND A DEEP UPPER LEVEL LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM IN THE NORTHEAST PACIFIC WILL MOVE ONTO THE COAST AROUND 830 AM THIS MORNING AND REACH THE INTERIOR LOWLANDS BETWEEN 930 AM AND NOON.

THE AIR MASS IS COLD AND UNSTABLE AND THERE WILL BE A GOOD DEAL OF WIND SHEAR ALOFT AS THIS DISTURBANCE MOVES THROUGH THE AREA. THIS COMBINATION SUPPORTS THE FORMATION OF STRONG AND ROTATING THUNDERSTORMS THAT MAY PRODUCE COLD-AIR FUNNEL CLOUDS…SMALL HAIL…AND WIND GUSTS TO 45 MPH.

COLD AND UNSTABLE AIR WILL CONTINUE TO STREAM INTO THE AREA THIS AFTERNOON AND THIS EVENING. THERE IS A POTENTIAL FOR ADDITIONAL STRONG THUNDERSTORMS BEHIND THE INITIAL MORNING IMPULSE.

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE WILL BE MONITORING THE SITUATION CLOSELY AS IT UNFOLDS AND WILL ISSUE STATEMENTS AND WARNINGS AS NEEDED. WE ARE ACTIVATING THE SKYWARN SPOTTER NETWORK AT THIS TIME. PLEASE CALL THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IF YOU SEE UNUSUAL CONVECTIVE ACTIVITY.

A stentorian radio announcer read this a little while ago on Classic KING FM. It sounded alarming and awesome. Note also that all ellipses are theirs… such style. I love you, National Weather Service.

20 replies on “Weird Weather Warning”

  3. I’m glad someone else is noticing this too. I’ve always wondered why the National Weather Service yells at me. It reminds me of some ye ol’ crazy town’s person running into the square in histrionics and warning of impending DOOOOOOM!

  5. I love reading the NWS text forecasts and warnings. Sometimes they are funny, occasionally they are poetic, and they are always entertaining!

  6. Why on earth made the elder generation think that all caps was more legible? And if they really thought all caps was so great, why didn’t they print everything in all caps? Put whole books and newspapers in all caps if you think its such an awesome way to communicate why don’t you.

    And why do they keep doing it that way? The whole National Weather Service staff can’t be 75 years old can they? And even if they quaintly insist on this cranky nonsense, how come everybody who reposts their bulletins doesn’t drop it to lowercase?

  7. I think the National Weather Service will be forever stuck in the age of the Teletype. A May 28, 2010 memorandum announcing a possible change to mixed-case and “expanded-punctuation” communications at some point in the future was, you guessed it, in ALL CAPS with ellipses. There’s a link to the memo in the brief discussion here.

  8. How do I know if I see unusual convective activity? What if I’m seeing it right now and just don’t know what it looks like? Does the fate of Seattle’s weather rest in my hands?

  10. @6, there’s a bit of explanation in the Teletype article I linked @6. These machines communicated using a 5-bit Baudot code that allowed only a 32 character set. They actually had no way of creating lower-case characters.

    The first computing experience for Bill Gates, me, and millions of others was at the keyboard of a Teletype ASR-33 linked to a mainframe computer.

  14. I’m old. Old enough to remember Telex machines being commonly used for hotel reservatons and everything about the Telex was ALL CAPS.

    Plus, there was a whole language to it, because you were charged by the character or something. Thus “1KN 2AD 1CH IN 2/15/11 3NTS LT ARR ND RLWY CRB BL RM HLD AMX” meant 1 king room for 2 adults, 1 child, 1 infant, arriving 2/15/11 for three nights, they need a rollaway bed and a crib, hold for late arrival, secured by American Express card.

    We didn’t think anything of it, of course. It was high tech at the time. In those days, instead of a computer on your desk, you had an ashtray. Even people who didn’t smoke, because people who came to visit you needed a place to put their cigarette.

  15. There were some cool funnel clouds over Bellevue a few days ago.

    Global warming (or major global and localized climate changes due to extra energy in the systems, call it what you will) – it’s for dinner.

  16. Oh hell, Catalina, I’m so old I remember getting high on the fumes from mimeograph machines when helping teachers run off copies of quizzes. I’m so old I remember CARBON PAPER. I’m so old, I remember the first typing class I took had MANUAL typewriters.

    I remember Telexes, too.

  19. I amuse myself by reading these out loud in a fake-poor-reception-AM-radio voice making static-y noises at all the ellipses in imitation of the traffic alerts you tune into going over the passes.

Comments are closed.