TV weatherman pushes NOAA radios at home

News Channel 9 Meteorologist David Glenn is among the ranks of those who say, “You’ve got to have a NOAA weather radio.”

Addressing Monday’s meeting of the Kiwanis Club of Dalton at the Northwest Georgia Trade and Convention Center, Glenn said a weather radio is “just as important as a smoke alarm.”

“Granted a lot of folks had us streaming on their phones or listening on radio, but they need NOAA weather radios,” Glenn said. “I’m on the air, but I can’t reach through the screen and say, ‘Hey, wake up.’ These things have alerts on them that are incredibly loud. But it gets you up.”

After the spring storms, News Channel 9 sold thousands of weather radios at area Walgreens.

When questioned about weather radios, Glenn said to make sure your radio has SAME (Specific Area Messenger Coding) technology.

“You can set it for as many counties as you want, but whenever it’s for one county where you live it won’t be going off all of the time,” he added. “You’ll know that when it goes off, it’s for you.”

“It’s what I have at my house,” the meteorologist said. “At 2 o’clock in the morning when the storm’s coming up, my senses don’t wake me up, the weather radio wakes me up.”

He also said families need to have a safety plan in place and you have to execute it.

“The days before April 27, we knew this was going to be potentially bad,” Glenn said. “No one ever envisions whole neighborhoods ripped up but when I am looking at it from a computer model it was unnerving how bad this could be.”

He described the day as “horribly painful.” He added, “When that day was finally over and some of the video started coming in I didn’t want to look at it. All I want to do was to go home. I knew there were some people who didn’t have a home. And it took forever to get home. Traffic was backed up on the exits toward Ringgold. It was dark outside. And you don’t realize how thankful you are for streetlights until you have no power. It’s like driving in a cave. There’s debris everywhere. But when I went home that was the greatest feeling just to get home.”

Glenn told the Kiwanians, “I look at this 24/7/365 … constantly watching the patterns. There are some weather patterns that are three to 45 days in length. There are some weather patterns on a larger scale which are three to four months in length. And then other oceanic circulation cycles which go years in length. Sometimes decades in length.”

“When you look at the average human life span of 70 to 80 years … when you look at a global cycle … we go through maybe one and a half to maybe two. Sometimes extreme events come back around every twenty, thirty, forty years.”

Glenn said he first became interested in weather due to a fear of tornadoes as a child. He recalled that there was a “super outbreak of tornadoes” in April 1974.

Younger viewers have been led to believe that mountains would keep this area from being hit by tornadoes. Recognizing that tornadoes are extreme, the speaker said “when April 27 happened it brought about a new awareness.”

“I learned early on that elevation change provides a lot of friction at the surface so it can allow disruption of a tornadic funnel, but it doesn’t prevent them,” Glenn said.

Going decades without a bad outbreak allowed for “weather amnesia.”

Last April reminded area residents that the mountains and ridges don’t stop tornadoes. “All you have to do is go to the Ringgold exit and look up the ridge there where it just plowed right over. Or, go to Trenton and see where it plowed right over Sand Mountain.”

“The mountains are tall to us,” he said. “But from a tornado, from a storm that’s 60,000 feet in height looking straight down, it’s like a little lump in the carpet. It’s nothing to a storm. It’s not going to prevent it or block it. Fortunately where we are it doesn’t happen very often.”

The veteran meteorologist was working in Mobile from 1998 to 2006 during 11 tropical storms. Among those were Ivan, Dennis and Katrina. He recalled the shock of area residents and said he experienced similar disbelief in Tennessee Valley residents last spring.

New technology has helped forecasters, he said.

“Just being in the industry twenty years, it’s phenomenal on what we call old and new data,” Glenn said. “Twenty years when I was to get data 20 minutes old that was great. I get stuff 30 minutes old now I’m like, ‘Yeah, get out of here.’”

This winter has been “mild so far.” But the forecaster said, “I still don’t think we’re through. I still see some cold periods coming up, probably as soon as next week. Is it going to snow? That’s one of those wild cards you can’t project. You’ve got to take it system by system. It is still just late January. We’ve seen snow systems as late as March.”

In the past 20 years, the three years that warmer than normal Decembers and Januaries also had warmer than normal Februaries.

“But they all had some accumulating snowfall.” Glenn said. “It may be warmer than normal in February, but lookout. All it takes is a day or two for the right conditions to get snow.”

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