WEATHER EVENTS: October 2004 Archives

The date for our annual Fermilab/WGN Tornado and Severe Weather
Seminar has been set. The 2005 seminar(s) will take place at 1PM and,
as always, be repeated at 7PM, Saturday, April 9. You're invited to
attend either. We'll be sharing information on our speakers and the
topics we'll be tackling in April in coming months on this blog and
are looking forward to seeing many of you there. As always, there will
be no charge for admission and seating is always on a first come/first
served basis, so we suggest getting there early.
The Spring, 2005 program will be the 24th we've put on since Brian
Smith, at the time a researcher and student of the legendary tornado
Dr. Ted Fujita at the University of Chicago, subsequently a severe
weather forecaster for years at NOAA's National Severe Storms Forecast
Center and now (and for many years now) the Warning Coordination
Meteorologist at the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Omaha
and I put the first program together back at Geneva High School out in
the Fox Valley in the early 1980s. We were offered the chance to move
the program to the beautiful Ramsey Auditorium at the Fermilab
National Acceleratory Laboratory in Batavia a year later and have been
there ever since. Working there with Bill Flaherty and Fred Ullrich
and their phenomenal staff at Fermilab all these years has been an
incredible honor and pleasure and we're looking forward to the April
9, 2005 program.
Over the years, we've welcomed many of the best and brightest in
the field of severe weather research and prediction, whose insights
into this fascinating branch of meteorological study, have been shared
by tens of thousands from all over the Midwest who have traveled in to
attend the annual seminars. Always a genuine thrill is working with
Dr. Joe Schaefer, Director of the Storm Prediction Center in Norman,
Oklahoma, who has joined us for years now, as well as working with my
colleagues from the National Weather Service Chicago Forecast Office,
including Jim Stefkovitch, our NWS-Chicago Meteorologist in Charge
(MIC) who first spoke at our Fermilab program three years ago and
later accepted the MIC post here and the incredibly hard working Jim
Allsopp, Warning Coordination Meteorologist, who's not missed one of
our Fermilab programs that I can remember and presents a tornado
spotting segment each year which is always illuminating and
informative.
We'll tell you about our April, 2005 speakers in subsequents
blogs here.

-Tom Skilling

An optical phenomenon known as "sun dogs" or "mock suns"--and more technically referred to as "parhelia" by optical meteorologists--was visible toward sunset Thursday evening (Oct. 21). Many thanks to the National Weather Service's Al Pietrycha, who digitally photographed the event and relayed the shot to us. It's Al's photo you're viewing here.

The response by area residents to sun dogs has always interested me. They can't be said to be rare. By the same token, they don't occur everyday either. That's why the number of phone calls which, over the years, have come into our office here at WGN about them, has always surprised me. Sun dogs, which appear as bright, prism-colored arrays either side of the sun's disc, are actually a form of halo and are the product of the refraction (or bending) of sunlight as it passes through high altitude (cirrus) clouds composed of ice crystals. It's been estimated sun dogs are visible up to two dozen times a year across most sections of the U.S. and Canada.

- Tom Skilling

Welcome to the WGN Weather Center Blog! This is the newest addition to a host of products which originate from this facility and we're really excited by it. We've been looking forward to introducing this to you for some time.

The weather programs you see on WGN-TV, CLTV and our Chicago Tribune weather page all originate in this facility. It was just a year ago we moved into our new digs here, installed a new, state of the art computer graphics system and welcomed our CLTV colleagues to the office. Now, all of the Tribune's Chicago weather operations are under one roof and the talented group of people, each with a passion toward tracking our always changing Chicago and Midwest weather, are together in one location. It's been a thrill to bring this group together and to now be in a position to communicate with you online through this blog.

Having all of our weather assets in one location where we can collaborate has afforded us the unique opportunity to produce some truly proprietary local meteorological work and we want this blog to be one means we can share it with you as well as some of the behind the scenes effort and thinking which is involved in our daily forecast work here. Through it, you'll have the opportunity to share observations about the weather issues you've found interesting with those of us you see on camera and with the veteran behind the scene meteorologists, including Steve Kahn, Richard Koeneman, Paul Dailey and Dennis Haller ---each with 40 and more years of service at the National Weather Service and regular contributors to our Chicago Tribune weather page and with others who link to this site.

With this blog, we've a place now where we can share insights on the weather we're not able to address through our current on-air and print efforts. It affords us a chance to share with you and expand upon elements of our work and the thoughts we have on weather events which, until now, have remained behind the scenes and undisseminated---but also, an importantly, for you to get involved. This is a work in progress and an entity whose shape and form will change and expand as we listen to the topics which interest you and we better understand your interests.

We are approaching the matter of postings which appear here carefully until we get a feel for the level of response our blog engenders and caution that our day to day duties may limit our ability to respond to individual inquiries as frequently or completely as we might like--especially in the early stages of our blog.. But, we encourage weather questions for our Ask Tom segments and columns be addressed to "asktomwhy@tribune.com". This also affords you another means of communicating with us.

We spend a good deal of time in the production of the daily Chicago Tribune weather page. It's been a labor of love here since the project began more than 7 years ago Now, for the first time, we are going to be able to share many of our page's most important and popular features with you online and in real time, archiving them as we go. You'll be able to access and read our coverage of important weather events anytime you wish.

We look forward to having you with us on our new WGN/Tribune weather blog and hope you enjoy it.

- Tom Skilling

Check out this live web cam of Mount St. Helens.

- Amy Mowery