1.) Punta Gorda ASOS did not stay online. It was put out of commission
subsequently after a 109 mph wind gust, some 10-15 minutes before the
strongest winds hit (go back and note the time and surface pressure of that
observation).
2.) How would surface observations have saved lives and property,
considering hurricane warnings had been out for 2 days. This is the most
ridiculous nonsense I've read this week and it's only Thursday. Would the
hurricane go "OH NO I'VE BEEN MEASURED!" and quickly weaken to prevent
further damage? LOL...wouldn't expect anything else out of the "Smerb".

What do you proprose as a solution? If you actually took the time to read
the previous posts, you're realize that the obs are under FAA control now.
When the airport is closed for commercial traffic, they simply don't give a
hoot! Chalk one up for the ol' NWS here where you had dedicated
meteorologists and a true passion for observations and climatology. Thank
Uncle George W for that transition! So, instead of blasting at a poor,
defenseless instrument array full of metal parts, why not contact the local
airport representative(s) and ask them how their power feed and more
importantly their COMMUNICATIONS feed are wired and why they failed in
tropical storm force winds?

Sorry, but Lou's posts seem for more up and up on the intelligence scale.

Tell Uncle Joel and Aunt Barry I said hi!

Papa Smurf

"Smerby" wrote in message
om...
You could have not said it better. It is a joke how these stations
malfunctioned in Florida. During Frances'landfall there were no
surface obs coming in between Daytona Beach and West Palm Beach. That
is a long stretch of real estate with no weather being reported, that
kind of stuff happens in a third world country. That data was need to
save peoples lives and property and some of the same stations went
down in Jeanne, long before any hurricane force winds arrived. What
really floored me was that the Punta Gorda site took a direct hit from
Charley and stayed up, reporting critical wind speed data that was
used to warn the people in Charley's path. Why would one site get
blasted and stay on line when other sites go down with much less wind.
What was the difference between the two reporting sites.

Smerby
www.accuweather.com






"Louis Gentile" wrote in message
m...
discussion.txt
Address:http://www.bluehill.org/discussion.txt Changed:2:43 PM on
Friday, September 24, 2004

The site above is a reminder of the observations of yester-year when
a
much better description of weather was regularly available through
the
surface observations and the greatest care was taken to avoid the
most
trivial mistake. There were instances of updated forecasts due to
data
that the trained observer recorded that is not easily detected by
satellite. I checked for observations from central and coastal
Florida
over the past 48 hours. No on site lightning detectors at the sites
I
checked. Equipment failure before wind gusts reach 60KT. My home
weather station can do better than that and it runs for thirty hours
after power failure - on triple A cells. Power blackouts - with no
back-up generator. How much does it cost to repair or install a
lightning detector? Is our government's debt so severe that we
cannot
even afford a workable system and have fallen behind some other
nation's observation systems as a result? In the lower 48, plus
Alaska, I have to go ten, twenty, and thirty years back into the
logbooks in order to retrieve accurate and detailed surface
observations, especially when studying events related to
thunderstorm
activity, nor'easters, blizzards and tropical cyclones.

Regards,
Lou


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Just would like to add one comment. Back in my days the power
interruption usually did not result in a total communications failure.
The phones still worked.


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