We have seen an unusally active tornado season in 2008. So far we have had 814 tornadoes across the country with the majority in the southeastern states. Normally, we should have seen just about 380 by this time. The normal average for the entire year is 1270.

Here is a graph comparing this year with recent years and with the average:

 

HEMMERS REPORT

Snook season is closed until Sept 1st. You can still catch and release. Make sure you return them to the water as quickly as possible. Most of the snook are close to the beach. Pinfish is the best bait at this time.

The kingfish run is starting to slow. You can troll up a few around the artificial reefs. A gold spoon and a #2 planer will do the trick.

Grouper are still in the 60ft range. The larger ones are farther out. Live pinfish will work best.

Trout action is starting to slow. Look for them near the drop-off of the flats. A slowly worked jig will draw the most strikes.

the gcvlargo family wishes you a very happy birhday and many more to come to enjoy with your new family this year

 

 gcv largo

Over the weekend the country of Myanmar (which used to be called Burma) experienced a cyclone equivalent to what we would know of as a category 3 hurricane. As last check this storm has killed at least 15,000 people. That begs this question; how in this day and age could this happen. We in the US sometimes have days notice that a storm is coming. First I will start by telling you that this is one of the poorest countries in the world. They don't have TV's, internet, cell phones, etc. Most of them probably had no idea this storm was coming.

When I was in college, I did a paper on Bangladesh. There was a cyclone in the 1970s, that killed over 100,000 people. Thats astonishing!! Most of the people worked and lived near the rice patties. That is their living. That is how they feed their families. Can you imagine not knowing a storm is coming, and for those that did, they couldn't do anything about it. It's not like they have cars to drive away. This is the exact same thing that happened in Myanmar. Now the fear is disease. With no homes, clean water, or food around, thousands and thousands are left to find a way to survive.  Often times polluted water can leade to many water borne diseases and many more deaths. The good news about this catastrophe is that the country has allowed the United Nations to send food, water, and medical supplies to help. That will no doubt help to raise morale and save a few lives. I know our country has its problems, but sometimes you have to sit back see how lucky we do have it, compared to some of these third world countries.

We are in the drier part of the year now but the rainy season usually begins from late May to mid June. Another event that occurs soon is the beginning of hurricane season on June 1. A tropical wave moved off of Africa yesterday. It's much too early for tropical waves to develop into depressions or storms since the water temperature in the eastern Atlantic is still too cool. But it is a reminder to be prepared for the upcoming season and have a personal plan in place. The plan doesn't have to be elaborate but just think ahead about what you would do should a tropical system threaten us this summer.

The first name on the list is Arthur and the second name is Bertha. Let's hope we do not make it all the way to Wilfred.

HEMMERS REPORT

Snook are moving through the docks on the West Side of Tampa Bay. Fish the fronts of the docks during low tide. When the tide is high, fish under the dock. A scaled sardine is the bait of choice.

Kings are still hanging in the ship channel. Look for markers that have bait schools on the surface. Jig up the baits and slow troll near the bait schools.

Trout, bluefish, mackerel and ladyfish can be found over the grass flats that are 3 to 4ft deep. Strawberry and motor oil colored jigs are working great. Drift the grass until you locate the fish. Once found, you can re-drift that area.

Tarpon are starting to show-up on the beach in Tarpon Springs. The bridges in Tampa Bay are also producing. The Skyway is good during the day and the Gandy is good at night.

It's the last day of April and officially it will go down in the books as wetter than normal, but that is only thanks to all the rain on April 6th where we picked up 2.05" on that one day. Otherwise there was not much to speak of in April. We have also seen the last couple of fronts get weaker and weaker as they move into the state. This time of the year we are known as the graveyard of fronts. The last front that moved thru on Monday night brought lower humidity and only marginally cooler weather. One nice bonus is with the drier air it did allow for a cooler night last night.

Brooksville had a cool low of 44° last night! The front left nothing but clear skies across the entire area today. We had a high of 84° today here in Tampa but with dewpoints in the low 40s it felt more like a late March day. One of the really cool tools we get to use at FOX 13 is McIdas HD which we normally use to display GOES 12 imagery. One of the other things we use it for is to display true color images from the MODIS satellites known as Terra and Aqua. What a great view from the sattellite today! Not a single cloud over 80% of the state. With the mid day pass from the satellite and the sun over head it makes the coastline look like it is glowing with the sun glint. Check out these images!

And a close up of central Florida:

If you look close you will notice a little smoke drifting south from a fire in Okeechobee county. These images are 250 meter resolution images taken this afternoon from the Aqua MODIS satellite.

So now we are heading into May and it is also one of our drier months. Typically our rainy season starts up around the 2nd or 3rd week of June. So May is usually just dry and HOT!  Cold fronts have little to no effect on our weather because they either just don't make it here or by the time they get here they are so weak they are really nothing more than a shift in the wind and slightly drier air. We may mention a front and unless you watched the weather that day, you would have no idea today was any different than the day before. With that in mind it looks like this weekend will be one of those fronts. A cold front is heading our way for Sunday, but all the energy will go well to our north so maybe the northern part of our state will see a shower or two, but other than that just a shift in the wind. Here is a little animation from the GFS model showing our weekend front.

On the last day of the recent Hurricane Conference, Dr. Chris Landsea from the National Hurricane Center presented talk about Global Warming and hurricanes. As I have mentioned before,  the great Miami hurricane of 1926 is the benchmark they use to estimate what further storms may do. If that same type of storm was to occur today it could cause 140-157 billion dollars in damage, double of what Hurricane Katrina caused.  So when they normalized that storm for 2008 damage, they went back and did the same with all of the destructive storms from the 1920s and 1930s. What they found was staggering. With the way the US coastline has been built up, if any of those type storms were to occur today the damage amounts would be staggering. So based on damage estimates alone you can't conclude that global warming is influencing hurricanes.

There seems to be a trend for more storms overall and more short-lived storms. After research they have concluded that technological advances are the reason for this. Several decades ago they didn't have satellites and the aircraft data like they do now. This plus the advanced computer modeling is allowing us to see storms they couldn't see back then.

Then there were two things that actually got my attention that he mentioned.  First was when he made the statement that gloabl warming may actually decrease the amount of storms. Yes indeed wouldn't that be interesting. Even though sea surface temps continue to rise, if indeed global warming continues this may cause more wind shear in the Tropical Atlantic.  Think of it like a constant El Nino. During one, it tends to cause more wind shear and less storms overall. It doesn't mean that big ones can't form, just that there may be fewer. So it would be an interesting battle between wind shear and warmer water as to which would be the dominant factor in this scenario.

And the last fact is a bit alarming. In the 1920s and 1930s there were a lot of major hurricanes that hit Florida. GIven the same multi-decadal swing of storms we are now in a more active period and this may likely happen again.

HEMMERS REPORT

Grouper fishing is good in the 60 to 130ft range. Start the action going with frozen sardines before switching to live bait. Large pinfish and Spanish sardine are the best live baits.

Redfish are schooling in large numbers in the lower parts of Tampa Bay. Most of the schools are real spooky. Approach the area with a push pole or a trolling motor on low speed. Look for areas that have nervous water or mullet schools.

Snook are working their way toward the beach. They are in the residential canals south of Weedon Island to the bridges that link the mainland to the beach. A threadfin or scaled sardine is the bait of choice.

Look for the kingfish in the shipping channel. Start at Egmont Key and work your way out. Most of the kings are small, but last weeks Tournament winner came out of the Egmont hole.

April started off on a wet note, but ever since the weather has been fairly typical for this time of the year. Well we did have that big cool down last week, but since then we have seen a very persistent low sitting of the east coast of Georgia.

This afternoon we saw a few showers bumping up along the east coast of Florida and they have persisted into the evening. These showers have not made it into the interior of the state so our weather remains pretty much status quo. With hardly any clouds and no rain we have seen highs in Tampa in the mid 80s the last two days. This week we have been talking in our weathercast on TV about this weather pattern because with this low sitting to our east and high pressure sitting to our west it just keeps a dry northerly wind over us with a bit of an afternoon seabreeze developing to keep the coast a bit cooler. You can see this spin off the east coast and notice what clouds there are move towards the south over the gulf in this McIdas HD satellite loop. That shows a very quit pattern for us.

This pattern will stay with us for the next few days until another front moves to the eastern US....this front won't head into Florida but what it will do is help to push the lows and highs along and switch up our wind directions...that will give us a bit more moisture and may give us atleast the chance of a shower towards the weekend. You can see that in the model run out of SkyTower HD VIPIR.

On Thursday morning the winds our more out of the Northeast for us...I think the cloud cover in the model is a little overdone...but you get the idea...it will still be dry.

Then by Friday we have the front moving towards the east. It won't make it into Florida, but it helps to nudge a high of the South Carolina coast. That will give us more easterly winds which in the summer would mean afternoon storms. In April it means partly cloudy skies and maybe just enough moisture to give us a shower.

I wanted to talk a little this week about a storm surge study that the Hurricane Center has been working on.  Let me first start by talking about storm surge itself. It's defined as  water that is pushed toward the shore by the force of the winds swirling around the storm. The wind causes the water to pile up higher than the ordinary sea level. It can range from just a few feet to in extreme cases over 30 feet. When the Saffir-Simpson scale was created to rate hurricanes they associated certain storms surges with wind speeds and categories, but now we are learning that this is not the case. Take the case of Hurricane Dennis in 2005. The big bend area of Florida has a huge storm surge even though the hurricane made landfall 180 miles away. Near where the storm made landfall, there was very little storm surge. What happened was the storm surge got trapped over the continental shelf and thats why the highest surge was so far away from the center. Well that wasn't the only case of the surge not matching the situation. Lets take 2 big hurricanes Charley and Katrina. When Charley made landfall its storm surge wasn't a huge problem, but it brought higher winds than Katrina. When Katrina made landfall, it believe it or not was a weaker storm than Charley but there was a 30 foot storm surge in Mississippi. This was a huge eye opener that we couldn't just go by wind speed alone to estimate storm surge.  After a lot of research and re running models inclusing the SLOSH (which estimates storm surge) it was determined that storm surge is dependent on the size of the wind field and central pressure as well. The larger the wind field the more potential the surge has. Let me give you a hypothetical. If Storm A had winds of 100mph, but a small wind field, and Storm B had 100mph winds but the hurricane and tropical storm force winds were triple in diameter the storm surge would be a lot bigger; but yet they are storms of the same strength. Katrina was a huge huge storm, it's wind field massive. That plus it's sheer strength early on allowed the surge to develop and get bigger and bigger. Charley was a small storm. I think for a cat 3-4 storm to hit Punta Gorda and Tampa to have a 12-14 mph wind it must be a small storm.  So you have to kind of throw out the Saffir Simpson scale in terms of storm surge, recalculate the SLOSH model and pay more attention to size rather than strength in helping to determine storm surge. This will be an interesting hurricane season to see how this theory pans out.  

Just when it looked like April was going to be a wet month the pattern has evolved into a more typical pattern for this time of year with high pressure locked in over the southeast. The result has been lots of sunshine and low humidity. The weather has been great to be outside, but the fire danger is on the rise, especially across inland areas.

Spring is the time of year that the seabreeze has a major effect on our weather. Water temps are still cool while the blazing sun warms up the land much faster than the Gulf of Mexico. When the land is heated, it rises - to replace the rising air, the wind blows in from the Gulf cooling the coastline. Sometimes we can see as much as a ten degree temperature difference beween the beaches and inland location. Notice how the temperatures flip flop at night. Air cools more efficiently over land so late night temps are often much cooler inland than at the beaches.

Congrats and best wishes to Jule McGee. Jule is a FORTY ONE year veteran of WTVT who is retiring tomorrow. He has held many behind the scene positions at WTVT, most recently as operations manager. A true character, and a guy that really cared about the success of this television station. His salty style is going to be missed.

 

 

My pic is an example of my question.  (If you turn your head to the left you can see a FL native walking up the coast.... The animated radar was really a blast to watch!)  The day I captured the radar image we had been told that there was no chance of rain.  It poured while I drove home from work!

On Saturday morning I woke up early, 6:30, to catch the weather.  The approaching front was depicted as a solid blue line going northeast of us... coming over us was the red and blue line... "The front will not effect us.  We will see some areas hit the upper 80's to low 90's on Sunday."  In the last weather segment of the morning the line had turned to the solid blue line with the front coming across us and "seasonable temps in the low 80's, low humidity, and morning temps in the 60's, and no rain".  I woke up to rain!

FL does not go by the "April showers bring May flowers" saying.  Yet we've had a wet April.  I love the lower temps... and the savings on my electric bill, but... what awaits us in the next few months.  All the new equipments is tauted as making future forcasts more accurate... but so far the foreasts have been off more often than on. 

Paul and I had this joke last fall about which one of us was causing the rain to miss where we lived, but downpours all over the rest of the county.  It would be pouring a few blocks all around us, but we didn't get a drop. 

I am afraid of what the upcoming hurricane season will be like.

Snook fishing in upper Tampa Bay is hot. Most of the larger schools are in the Gandy area. Scaled sardines are the bait of choice. Look for them along the mangrove shoreline and swash islands.

The lower part of Tampa Bay has good numbers of trout and redfish. The trout are hanging over areas of grass and sand. Target the 3 to 4-foot zones. The reds are schooling with the mullet. The hot bait for reds is a threadfin herring.

The strong winds over the past few days have scattered the kingfish schools. The best place to locate them is the shipping channel. Start at markers 5 and 6 then work your way out. They will strike a Spanish sardine that can be jigged up around the cans.

I wanted to talk for a second about a problem which the Hurricane Center first talked about last year but did touch on again this year; the Quickscat satellite. Last year the director of the Hurricane Center at the time Bill Proenza openly criticized his bosses and also the imminent failure of the satellite. He said if and when it fails hurricane forecasting accuracy would decrease dramatically. Well fast forward to this season, and with a new chief, they are playing damage control. Here's where I need to put everyones fears to rest.

First off the Quickscat satellite  is an earth-observing satellite that provides wind speed and direction information over oceans to NOAA. It was launched June 19, 1999, with a 3 year life span, but it continue to chug on. It's primary purpose was not to focus on tropical cyclone, but it has proven instrumental in helping with developing tropical systems. When tropical waves form out over the open oceans planes aren't sent to investigate unless they are threatening land. So thats where the twice a day pass of the Quickscat comes in. It actually does a great job at estimating these developing storms, and determining where the low level circulation is. As these storms reach Tropical Storm status, the satellite continues to provide important data for the forecasters. Here's what people don't know about this satellite. IT DOES NOT DO WELL FOR HURRICANES. It suffers from all kinds of convective feedback in determining the surafce winds and circulation. Not to say it is not helpful, but it helps far more with weaker storms than it does hurricanes. That is something that most people didn't know. When a storms even comes near land, aircraft will be flying around the clock inside the storm to achieve data. This to me is far more valuable data since it is constant, and with an ever changing storm you don't have to rely on a 2 pass a day satellite. I am not saying the Quickscat is not useful because it is, but if it was to fail the Hurricane Center shouldn't skip a beat. There is a similar satellite that the Europeans use, but it is not as good, and they have postponed another sattelite launch until  somewhere around 2016. So no worries, as long as we have everything else, I think the stellar forecasts from the Hurricane Center will continue.

HEMMERS REPORT

 

SNOOK ARE FEEDING BEST IN THE UPPER PARTS OF Tampa Bay. A scaled sardine is the best bait. Free-line where you see the snook schooling. Light tackle will get the most strikes.

Tarpon are showing up around the Skyway Bridge and the cuts inside of the bridge. A free-lines pinfish is the bait of choice. Cast in front of rolling tarpon and let the pinfish do the rest.

Kingfish are hanging in the shipping channel. Start at markers 7 and 8, then work your way out. You can jig up trolling baits around the markers.

The trout action remains hot. Most of the action is over areas that have sand and grass. Work the areas that are 3 to 4ft deep.

 

Last year, we couldn't BUY a drop of rain and we were choking on smoke from rampant forest fires in neighboring counties. The drought was worse up here in North Florida than it was in the Bay Area (although we were kind enough to share our smoke with Bay Area residents).

This year, we have been blessed by a reasonably (if not terribly) wet late-winter/early-spring. and I DO mean BLESSED. The only thing worse than watching your landscaping get parched in the relentless heat is watching forest fires burn and seeing your rivers, streams, and ponds dry up.

Now we have swapped the smoke for mosquitoes. In five years of living in Alachua County, the mosquitoes are the worst that I have seen them. But it is a small price to pay. Hey, that's what Cutter is for.

Here's another side benefit of the rain...go to Publix and get yourself some fresh corn. It is the BEST that I've tasted in years. I'm no expert but I'd be willing to bet money that the rain is at least part of the reason why the corn is so good.

Over the next few weeks, I am going to blog about some of the things I overheard at this years National Hurricane Conference. Some of it is old hat, some of it new. For my first blog let me talk about a lecture from Craig Fugate who is the Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management.  His lecture focused on Florida Catastrophic Planning.

First off I have to say that Hurricane Katrina a few years back taught all emergency managers valuable lessons. I guess we all realized that no matter how prepared we thought we are, it has to be better. So the FDEM(Florida Division of Emergency Management), has set up their planning on a storm like the great Miami Hurricane of 1926. That storm devastated Miami, Lake Okeechobee, then returned to the Gulf of Mexico near Tampa before making another landfall near Pensacola. If such a storm of the same magnitude and size was to hit the same area today damage estimates could be between 130 and 150 billion dollars!!!!!! Using LIDAR which is high resolution digital elevation maps, and the US National Grid, the state can pinpoint areas that would be at most risk.  After the storm is over their primary objectives would be to secure the area and make sure everyone was safe. Then and only then could the state begin the process of helping people recover. When we tell you to prepare three days worth of supplies for your family, we mean it.  The state is counting on this. They need that first 72 hours to secure and make afe the effected area. So no matter how fantastic the state disaster plan may be, if you don't do your part, the whole system breaks down. Craig promised, we will be there, but you need to mkae sure you are ready for three days. And I do believe he is right. Think of it this way, you don't rely on the Red Cross or the state to provide food and water each day, why would you do this after the storm. Craig also made a point that there has to be some localization of this help. For examples, if there are restaurants and shops which are able to provide food, shelter, and water why can't they help instead of everybody going hungry until the state gets there. Again another great idea. Most people have cash on hand for just this very reason.  I am sure that the state or federal government would help out these restaurants afterwards. It was interesting listening to Craig because at times he felt like my dad lecturing me. But you know what, he is right!!! It is an individuals responsibility to be prepared for these storms. We try to drill it into peoples head, but many do not listen. So before you go blaming everyone else, ask yourself did I prepare for 72 hours first.

Normally, April is our driest month with a total of 1.8 inches of rain. So far we are slighty above normal already for the month due to yesterday's rains. Earlier this week, it almost looked like summer with regular afternoon and evening thunderstorms occurring each day. As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, it is unusual that we have had a fairly wet winter and spring in Florida since we are in La Nina conditions. Almost without exception until now, La Nina is associated with drier than normal winters and springs in Florida.

Unfortunately, a lot of the rain events have occurred on weekends this year. The good news is that the rains are coming at regular intervals, not all at once. This allows water to soak into the aquifer more instead of just running off. Also, normally this time of year we are worried about the possibility of wild fires. So far we have been fortunate the the regular frequency of rain events has prevented any major forest firest.

What will the rest of the spring bring? Will La Nina act more normally and cause us to dry out or will we continue to get regularly spaced rain events that will help us through the fire season? Let's hope that the latter is the case. It would be better to have regularly spaced rain events in time than the ups and down with droughts and flooding.

The moist pattern we have been in most of this year continues this month. I know its a bit warm and humid but convective showers are about the only way we get rain this time of year. Rain in April is a good thing!!! This is usually our dry season where worries about drought and wild fires dominate the weather news.  This is a pattern we should all enjoy and hope it continues...even if our electric bills are a bit higher than usual.