![]() ![]() The following day, as flood waters rose and crime escalated, Dan and his remaining coworkers evacuated to a sister station in Orlando, FL, where they remained for the following two months.ĭan moved to Nashville and joined the WSMV team in August 2006. It was at that point that Dan and several coworkers evacuated to the hotel lobby for safety. The hotel beds began shaking two hours before landfall, due to the increasing wind. Dan recalls the room began creaking eight hours before landfall. He rode out the storm on the 11th floor of the Hilton Hotel in New Orleans. Dan warned viewers of the impending devastation during the final hours of preparation and the first hours of impact. Most notable was Dan's coverage leading up to and during Hurricane Katrina. His coverage of Hurricane Frances in 2004 earned him "First Place for Breaking Weather" from the Louisiana Associated Press. While there, he covered more than a half dozen hurricanes and tropical storms that hit the southeastern United States. For the following two years, he chased and tracked severe thunderstorms all across western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma.įrom tornado alley, Dan moved to "hurricane central" - New Orleans - in early 2003 to work as a broadcast meteorologist for WDSU-TV, the NBC affiliate. He completed his active duty military service in the fall of 2000 as a captain, leading a 15-person organization in weather operations at Vance Air Force Base in Enid, OK.Īfter his time in the military, Dan began his full-time career in television as the morning meteorologist for KHBS/KHOG-TV in Fort Smith/Fayetteville, AR. He deployed to the Middle East, where he briefed pilots on weather conditions for their training missions over Iraq's no-fly zone. He also joined the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps and was commissioned as a lieutenant upon graduation.Īfter graduate school, Dan began his military career at Moody Air Force Base in Valdosta, GA. ![]() ![]() While at Penn State, he worked as a part-time, on-air meteorologist for WPSX-TV. Needless to say, he's living out his dream.ĭan's passion for weather led him to The Pennsylvania State University, where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in meteorology. To this day, he still has a cassette recording from when he was 6 years old, on which he said, "It's rainy, snowy, windy. As a small child, in his hometown of North Andover, MA, he loved to stare out the window, watching New England's powerful ocean storms. Since hail can cause the rainfall estimates to be higher than what is actually occurring, steps are taken to prevent these high dBZ values from being converted to rainfall.Dan Thomas has been a weather fanatic for as long as he can remember. Hail is a good reflector of energy and will return very high dBZ values. These values are estimates of the rainfall per hour, updated each volume scan, with rainfall accumulated over time. Depending on the type of weather occurring and the area of the U.S., forecasters use a set of rainrates which are associated to the dBZ values. The higher the dBZ, the stronger the rainrate. Typically, light rain is occurring when the dBZ value reaches 20. The scale of dBZ values is also related to the intensity of rainfall. The value of the dBZ depends upon the mode the radar is in at the time the image was created. Notice the color on each scale remains the same in both operational modes, only the values change. The other scale (near left) represents dBZ values when the radar is in precipitation mode (dBZ values from 5 to 75). One scale (far left) represents dBZ values when the radar is in clear air mode (dBZ values from -28 to +28). Each reflectivity image you see includes one of two color scales. The dBZ values increase as the strength of the signal returned to the radar increases. So, a more convenient number for calculations and comparison, a decibel (or logarithmic) scale (dBZ), is used. ![]() Reflectivity (designated by the letter Z) covers a wide range of signals (from very weak to very strong). "Reflectivity" is the amount of transmitted power returned to the radar receiver. The colors are the different echo intensities (reflectivity) measured in dBZ (decibels of Z) during each elevation scan. ![]()
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