Speaker 1: Dave Frasier from Fox thirty one. Hello, Dave, how you
Speaker 1: doing today?
Speaker 2: I'm doing okay, Maddy? Has your day gone?
Speaker 1: You know what, It's beautiful outside. It's lovely weather all
Speaker 1: as well. I have nothing to complain about. That isn't
Speaker 1: a first world problem. So I do have questions, though, Dave,
Speaker 1: because obviously this week we've had some severe weather out
Speaker 1: east and some tornadoes touchdown, and I was thinking about this.
Speaker 1: I don't really necessarily know what weather conditions have to
Speaker 1: exist to make a tornado form in the first place,
Speaker 1: and why does it seem that those conditions are so
Speaker 1: prevalent on the plains versus say, in the mountains.
Speaker 2: So we have had tornadoes in the mountains. We've been
Speaker 2: talking a lot about tornadoes since what happened on a
Speaker 2: Sunday afternoon. Basically, you know, most of the tornadoes we
Speaker 2: see are east to Bye twenty five. More than ninety
Speaker 2: percent of them are east of Bye twenty five. There
Speaker 2: are maps out there you want to google them that
Speaker 2: will show you where storm where tornadoes have been reported
Speaker 2: going back to when they started collecting data in nineteen fifty,
Speaker 2: and you'll see that there are other parts of the
Speaker 2: state including Metro Denver, but the vast majority of them
Speaker 2: do form on the eastern planes. And what you're generally
Speaker 2: looking for is a setup where thunderstorms are going to
Speaker 2: be developing. And anytime you have thunderstorms in the forecast,
Speaker 2: if they're going to be strong enough, what we call
Speaker 2: towering circulating thunderstorms, those can produce tornadoes at any time.
Speaker 2: And generally we'll have a setup where maybe the conditions
Speaker 2: are a little more favorable because you've got spinning in
Speaker 2: the atmosphere to kind of generate it. So you know,
Speaker 2: without getting too scientific, you'll see us sometimes talk about
Speaker 2: a marginal risk, low end, a slight risk, a little better,
Speaker 2: an enhanced risk, even a higher chance for those storms,
Speaker 2: and that means that the environment is right for spinning
Speaker 2: out the southeastern corner of the Metro. We talk about
Speaker 2: the Palmer divide. What happened on Sunday was we had
Speaker 2: the Denver cyclone, and so you've got winds swirling into
Speaker 2: the city and coming up over the nose of that
Speaker 2: rise in elevation. Remember, terrain and wind are king when
Speaker 2: it comes to forecasting in Colorado. The wind direction is
Speaker 2: it going up, is it going down? And so What
Speaker 2: happened was we had a thunderstorm that generated right up
Speaker 2: over southeast or came up quickly, and the wind feeding
Speaker 2: into that was coming in from a southeast to the
Speaker 2: direction at lower levels, but the wind on the back
Speaker 2: side of it was kind of coming in for a
Speaker 2: northwesterly direction. So you've got this kind of borticity. You've
Speaker 2: got a little bit of rotation going, and as the
Speaker 2: thunderstorm grows, that rotation gets a little stronger, and eventually,
Speaker 2: withinside the thunderstorm, you have this rolling column of air.
Speaker 2: And eventually what happens is the updraft or the wind
Speaker 2: flowing into the thunderstorm. The feeding of the wind will
Speaker 2: cause that rotation to stand up straight and tall tornado
Speaker 2: drops down, and the tornado drops down. Now, in Colorado,
Speaker 2: we also have dust levels. It's the opposite formation. We
Speaker 2: also have land spouts. They tend to be weaker and small.
Speaker 2: It forms differently. It's a rotation like a dust level
Speaker 2: on the ground, and it attaches to a growing thunderstorm,
Speaker 2: and the thunderstorm acts like a vacuum and sucks up
Speaker 2: that rotus when you're yeah, so a little different formation.
Speaker 2: Tornadoes generally, as we define them, form inside the thunderstorm
Speaker 2: and then rotate down out of the base of the thunderstorm,
Speaker 2: where a land spout will start on the ground like
Speaker 2: a dust level and get drawn up into the circulation
Speaker 2: as the thunderstorm is growing. And they're both tornadoes. They're
Speaker 2: classified as tornadoes, but the land spouts tend to be
Speaker 2: small or short lived. And I will tell you that
Speaker 2: most of the time tornadoes we've seen here in Colorado
Speaker 2: are generally small, they're narrow, and they don't last more
Speaker 2: than ninety seconds. That was not the case on Sunday.
Speaker 1: Yeah, look kind of big and kind of scary. And
Speaker 1: somebody on the text line said, Sunday's tornadoes formed with
Speaker 1: a due point of forty five degrees. How does that happen?
Speaker 1: So where does temperature come into this?
Speaker 2: So due point is a measure of moisture in the air.
Speaker 2: Obviously we want moisture to play with. Colorado is a
Speaker 2: semi arid climbing Actually, forty five degree due points. Again,
Speaker 2: that's a measurement of moisture in the air represented as
Speaker 2: a temperature. It's pretty high for Colorado. Fifty sixty seventy's
Speaker 2: that's the kind of stuff you think about in the
Speaker 2: Midwest there have been eighty degree due points. You can
Speaker 2: you know, you can drink the air with a straw,
Speaker 2: it becomes oppressive, so you need that as a fuel mechanism.
Speaker 2: So you want warm air, you want a little bit
Speaker 2: of humidity, and then you want something to trigger it,
Speaker 2: to lift it. You need a lifting mechanism, and sometimes
Speaker 2: that's a cold front, sometimes it's a warm front. Sometimes
Speaker 2: it's a storm system, or in our case, it can
Speaker 2: be a wind direction around a terrain feature. And that's
Speaker 2: what happened on Sunday. There were four tornadoes reported. Two
Speaker 2: of them are the ones that did damage. They were
Speaker 2: both rated as EF twos, which you know the National Reservices.
Speaker 2: Breaking down everything, eighty six percent of the tornadoes we
Speaker 2: have seen since nineteen ninety five, and there's been thirteen
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty nine reports tornadoes since nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 2: It's actually not a huge count. That averages out to
Speaker 2: about forty five a year across the eastern plains of Colorado.
Speaker 2: It's decent, but it's certainly not the tornado alley that
Speaker 2: we think of in the Midwest. But eighty six percent
Speaker 2: of the ones that we see are those short lived
Speaker 2: ninety second narrow little ones. They're ees zeros where the
Speaker 2: speeds are going to be less than about sixty five
Speaker 2: to eighty five miles per hour. You certainly don't want
Speaker 2: to be in that, but it's generally not going to
Speaker 2: cause a lot of damage, if any at all. And
Speaker 2: then ten percent of the time they're EF ones. Now
Speaker 2: the wind's getting a little bit stronger, and then the
Speaker 2: EF twos they're only about three percent of the time.
Speaker 2: That's what we had on Sunday, And so this was
Speaker 2: a rare occur because it only happens about three percent
Speaker 2: of the time since nineteen ninety five. And that put
Speaker 2: the winds between one hundred and eleven one hundred and
Speaker 2: thirty five. And that corresponds with the damage that we
Speaker 2: saw the roof saw right knocked over, you know, telephone
Speaker 2: lines down, trees down, damage to other things like vehicles
Speaker 2: and windows blown out. So it all matched up.
Speaker 1: This textter asked what about sharknadoes? Dave, have we had
Speaker 1: any sharknadoes in Colorado? I don't think we have any
Speaker 1: sharks to sweep up into the tornadoes. This text or asked, Mandy,
Speaker 1: can you ask if a tornado is in your vicinity,
Speaker 1: or the ingredients are there for a tornado, Will the
Speaker 1: air or particles in the air turn green? This happened
Speaker 1: one year to us. The air turned greenish. And I
Speaker 1: have had that situation where there was not actually a tornado,
Speaker 1: but the sky was green and we were having tornado
Speaker 1: sirens going off, but we didn't actually have a tornado.
Speaker 1: What is that?
Speaker 2: It's just it's the debris in the air, the moisture
Speaker 2: in the air, the condensation in the air. It just
Speaker 2: gives it that green queue. You know. The tornado itself
Speaker 2: is by definition, a manny is a rotating column of air. Well,
Speaker 2: if it stays clean, sometimes it doesn't look that great.
Speaker 2: What we've witnessed, and a lot of people did along
Speaker 2: the front range is it was picking up dirt and
Speaker 2: debris and so you see it vividly. And the other
Speaker 2: great thing about Colorado, unlike the Midwest when it comes
Speaker 2: to viewing tornadoes, because we are a semi arid climate,
Speaker 2: you get a three hundred and sixty degree view of
Speaker 2: this thing all the way up to the base of
Speaker 2: the thunderstorm, where in the Midwest sometimes that thunderstorm is
Speaker 2: lower and it's pouring rain and the thing is hidden
Speaker 2: within the rain. We saw that with the Highland's Ranch
Speaker 2: tornado just a few years ago. It wasn't as vivid
Speaker 2: because it was that thing was producing heavy rain and hail,
Speaker 2: and so the tornado that ripped through the Highland's Ranch
Speaker 2: area was actually hidden from view where what we saw
Speaker 2: on Sunday was so vivid. The images that viewers shared
Speaker 2: with us, the videos, the pictures were fantastic, and it
Speaker 2: was just this awe of this tall climate, tall column
Speaker 2: of air dust bottom rotating, moving slowly across the landscape
Speaker 2: and in some places, unfortunately Elkhorn Ranch and the Bennett community,
Speaker 2: there was damage for those folks that unfortunately had to
Speaker 2: deal with it, and it is tough. Listen. We do
Speaker 2: our best to put out the advanced warnings days ahead
Speaker 2: that there's a risk. We do our best to let
Speaker 2: you know that thunderstorms could be possible in the afternoon.
Speaker 2: Colorado sometimes doesn't get the luxury of a watch right
Speaker 2: and buy there could be storms. Sometimes we go right
Speaker 2: to the warnings and that happens more often than not,
Speaker 2: and that's what happened on Sunday. The watchpots that actually
Speaker 2: came out came out after we had already had the
Speaker 2: tornadoes on the ground, and it was for northeast Colorado
Speaker 2: where they got one or two little radar indicated storms
Speaker 2: that didn't amount to much. So that happens. Sometimes we'll
Speaker 2: do our vestigate you the warnings. But anytime you hear
Speaker 2: us talking about a chance of storms in the forecast, lightning,
Speaker 2: wind and hail are possible, even if they don't reach
Speaker 2: severe limits. Be prepared for lightning when in hail and
Speaker 2: tornadoes can also be included in that. Even if it's
Speaker 2: a dust level, even if it's a land spout, all
Speaker 2: of that falls under the umbrella of the developing thunderstorm.
Speaker 2: And I will tell you on Oil Day weekend outdoor plans,
Speaker 2: we have a chance for storm. Saturday, we have a
Speaker 2: chance for Memorial Day storms. And Sunday right now is
Speaker 2: looking soggy and gray. There's a pretty good chance for rain. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so boo boo.
Speaker 1: Last question that has nothing to do with weather. This
Speaker 1: from Andy, they said on this day, following George Wentz passing,
Speaker 1: maybe you could ask Dave about the Cheers Bar and
Speaker 1: Beacon Hill in Boston. Why you ask well? Last night
Speaker 1: on his KdV our weather broadcast, Dave mentioned that he
Speaker 1: grew up in Boston and has visited the Cheers Bar. Now,
Speaker 1: when we were in Boston, we did not go to
Speaker 1: the Cheers Bar, and now I'm kind of sad I didn't.
Speaker 1: I mean, not that I wouldn't go back to Boston.
Speaker 1: It's a great town. But chair's been a lot of
Speaker 1: is that it like a tourist destination though.
Speaker 2: It was certainly it was when the when the show
Speaker 2: was on the air for the what was it eleven years,
Speaker 2: it was very very popular. I know the spot because
Speaker 2: I used to have an apartment diagonally up about two blocks,
Speaker 2: and obviously it was the place you go to when
Speaker 2: you go to it's called the Bull and Stinch Pub.
Speaker 2: It is actually down a set of stairs. The only
Speaker 2: two things that look the same as the show is
Speaker 2: the door entering the bar, and then the Indian statue
Speaker 2: that you'll remember there was in the corner once you
Speaker 2: went in. The bar itself inside the Bull and Stinch
Speaker 2: Pub does not look like the show. Gets a very
Speaker 2: small bar. It's a neighborhood bar. It's packed all the time.
Speaker 2: They actually put a plaque at the end of the bar.
Speaker 2: In the Bull and Finch plub on the bottom. I've
Speaker 2: sat in the sea that they put Norm's name on
Speaker 2: it with a stool and it's one stool there. Now,
Speaker 2: upstairs in the hotel that sits over the Bull and
Speaker 2: Finch Pub on the main level, there is a larger
Speaker 2: room where the actual set bar from Cheers fits and reside.
Speaker 2: You could look in at the actual set that they
Speaker 2: built for the show, and it looks a little bit different,
Speaker 2: but it's a great spot. I will tell you the
Speaker 2: first I'll tell your show story because I know we
Speaker 2: run along. The first time that I took my wife
Speaker 2: to Boston when we were dating, I took her to
Speaker 2: Cheers is the Bullingfinch Park and they have great They
Speaker 2: have great bloody marriage. My wife loves it. My brother
Speaker 2: met me there with his wife. We had bloody Mary's
Speaker 2: and we were having such a great time. Bartender let
Speaker 2: them go behind the bar and make their bloody marriage,
Speaker 2: he say. Needless to say, the rest of the afternoon
Speaker 2: was a little bit of a but it's a great
Speaker 2: it's a great fun spot. We went from there to
Speaker 2: Sanuel Hall and continue bar the bar and eat and
Speaker 2: made a whole afternoon and the day out of it
Speaker 2: Boston is a great walkable city with a ton of history,
Speaker 2: and I would encourage anybody who wants to visit it
Speaker 2: and sit by the bay and look out over the
Speaker 2: harbor to go and enjoy it. It's a fun city.
Speaker 1: Amen to that, Dave Fraser. We'll talk to you again
Speaker 1: next week, my friend, have a.
Speaker 2: Great Memorial Day. Weetay you too.