Tornado Warning!

We had a tornado warning where I live last night, right around 1 a.m. or so. My wife woke me up and told me the sirens were going off, so I turned on the TV in our bedroom and started watching the weather. Now Grand Rapids is one of those towns where "the weather" has been taken extra seriously for almost my entire adult life. By that I mean we long ago dispensed with "weather girls" or with having the weather report be the comedy relief portion of the local evening news. TV stations compete with each other in weather analysis and number of bona fide meteorologists on staff. And being professionals, they insist on having the latest in forecasting equipment -- I think one of our stations was the first in the nation to have a Doppler radar.

I watched the meteorologist as he described what was on the screen, moved in and out with the radar, interposed live video from outside, and pointed out where there was a locus of high wind shear, indicative of a forming tornado. At that point I decided to gather up the children and take them into the basement, even though the scary tornadic storm cell was miles north of us and heading east-northeast.

Nothing much happened, though. We watched for half an hour until the bulk of the heavy weather was past us, and I always enjoy listening to the meteorologists go all ecstatic showing off their weather toys. We were not visited with a tornado, nor struck by lighting, yet I was struck by how advanced our tools for keeping us up to date on the weather have become. When I was a kid, the entire county would have been under a tornado warning, and it would have lasted for hours. But last night, they put a red rectangle up on the screen which didn't cover a third of the city and that was the real area of concern.

We grow up taking technology for granted, so every now and then it is a nice change of pace to have bad weather shove our faces into a compare/contrast situation. There are many things in the past that I greatly prefer to today, but weather forecasting isn't one of them.