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