Great Pictures Charles!
Jeff said I would post some more info about the high wind gusts from the deracho event. It took me a few days to get access from Tim V. to post on the target area forum. Well, I was granted access, so thank you very much Tim.
I work in the Quality Assurance division at the Oklahoma Mesonet, and I thought I would post a few things about the wind gusts, if anyone is interested.
The 100 mph gust at the Marshall site (MRSH) and the 89 mph gust at the Minco site (MINC) were initially flagged as bad by our spatial test. The gust at MRSH was 3 standard deviations away from the spatial average of the surrounding sites at the time, and that is why it was flagged as "bad" and no one initially saw this report. The same thing happened with the MINC gust, only to a lesser extent. We found these "bad" obs and looked them over. We looked over the observations made by the sites at those particular times, and determined that the data were good. We then alerted Rick Smth at the NWS here in Norman, and within 10 minutes the wind reports were updated on their site. I really have to give Mr. Smith props for acting so quickly and getting that information up on their website. Hopefully these massive wind gusts will help the NWS and SPC verify their warnings and PDS severe watch that they issued that night. That is just one of many things that the Oklahoma Mesonet is good for.
Here are some facts about the gust at MRSH.
>Over the 5 minutes around the gust, the winds were sustained at over 70 mph.
>During the 1 minute that the gust was reported, the winds were sustained at over 90 mph.
>The gust of 100 mph was the third highest wind gust in Oklahoma Mesonet history....dating back to January 1st, 1994. The highest gust was 113 mph at Lahoma (LAHO) sometime during July of 1994.
>During the past weekend, one of our computer technicians went and visited the MRSH site. He found evidence of very strong winds, including snapped powerpoles, and some metallic debris wrapped around trees about 1/4-1/2 mile away from the site. The site was also slightly damaged. The cover for the battery enclosure was knocked off. There was also some damage to the guywires that hold the site up. One of the ground steaks for the northern wire appeared to have been pushed forward several inches, exposing fresh dirt. The site is also slightly leaning. Hopefully, one of our technicians will get up there and repair things soon.
At any rate, I hope that this is interesting.
--Phillip
