How Swede It Is

LOL!, LOL! Emily, that could be easily forgiven!!! (I would have love to have seen it!) We still LUV YA!!!

Van, that was great, and the segment you have made for the "Weather Kids" is great!!! I know you are a lot younger than me, but I wish that I had someone to encourage me to go for meteorology when I was in high school, because that is what I truly wanted to go to school for, but they all said it would take 8 yrs., and I thought that I could be a doctor in that many years! Instead, I became an RN, which I love (don't get me wrong), but weather is my "true passion"!!!

Emily... hahaha. Why haven't you told me about that before? That is classic.

And Van, I definatly knew that one was coming. You have an un-beatable story there.

However, I have both a favorite meteorological moment and event.

Of course my favorite moments have been both of the 'Weather Kids' segements Van allowed me to do for FOX8. I will always remember those.

However, my favorite meteorological event is actually quite embarassing and was a rather dangerous situation to have been in.
This past year, a few of my classmates and I were sent out by the school on a storm chase (we often sent multiple teams of 4-5 people out on severe weather outbreak days). This particular day was actually the same day that the tornado that hit Enterprise, AL. Fortunatly we were about 2 hours north of there.
As we found the storm we were assigned to follow, we ended up in some really rough, wooded, and hilly terrain. Most of what we had to follow were small, 2-lane roads in extremely rural Mississippi. Around this time we also started to lose cell phone contact with our professor back at school who was our radar/navigation link.
Through the static-y service and constant disconnections, there was a misunderstanding and he actually ended up leading us directly through the center of the storm.
So in the end, we ended up driving through extremely heavy rainfall, hail, severe-strength winds, lightning all around us... and then about 5 minutes after punching through to the southern side of the storm, we got to witness it produce a beautiful funnel cloud right on the Mississippi/Al

I don't know, Emily. I chuckle every time I think about yours now!

My most memorable weather event came in August of 1983. I grew up in East Texas, just about 80 miles north of Galveston, and that year, a Cat 3 Hurricane named Alicia made landfall. I was already a weather buff, tracking hurricanes since I was ten the old school way with pencil and a tracking chart a friend gave me from Texas A&M. Anyway, I stayed up all night in anticipation of the landfall, it was awesome. After she made landfall early that morning, the eyewall actually passed over our house. It was the eeriest thing I'd ever seen. To go from stormy to calm then back to very stormy. But the creepiest sound I've ever heard, to this day will be what people often refer to as 'the voice of a hurricane' and that is the howl the wind made as it blew through standing structures, low humming noises that increased in intensity as the wind would ebb and flow. I still get chills recalling that sound. I'll never forget it.