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Fulton Tornado Warning Coverage

D

deadman

What's up with Fox 5? I put them on first and they did a 5 min coverage. As soon as Jeff Hill went off the air, I had to switch to 11alive who stayed on for 30 mins. Why is a re-run of House more important than running coverage of a tornado warning in a major city?
 
Correction - 11alive is still going.. .

major damage in downtown Atlanta

I heard the freight train... I never ran so f--king fast.
 
The Raycom coverage (from the SEC tournament) was tremendous (not from a weather standpoint but from an at-an-event standpoint). I'm just blown away (no pun intended) by the job that Tim Brando, Dave Baker, et al did tonight.

Locally WXIA has pretty much clobbered everybody as far as I could tell from online.
 
CNN Center damaged...hole in roof and video archives damaged.

WSB was very late to the game. Paul Ossmann on WXIA got "on his soapbox" and said that as long as he was chief meterologist at WXIA, they will break into programming if there is a warning. WXIA wins tops.

It is 11:39 PM now (after normal programming normally resumes), and everyone is still on breaking news coverage. This was a big event. Everyone is now saying it was in fact a tornado that hit downtown Atlanta.
 
CNN has been running its coverage out of CNN International, which (although in the same building) is more likely to be staffed at this hour than CNN Domestic. Looks like they rolled Don Lemon and Rob Marciano out of bed to help, and they've been covering it fairly heavily. Neither of the other NewsNets have been consistently live with coverage.
 
Two weeks in a row WXIA has been first and best with the severe weather. Last week Adamson was first on the air with the Douglasville storm. This week Ossmann was. There coverage has been the best, and the most far reaching.

I will say though that neither Adamson who worked the daytime shows or Ossmann on the evening shows had any mention of severe storms for Friday. Most of the attention was on the potential for Saturday. Of course none of the other stations did either.
 
I always prefer Fox5's coverage, and last night was no exception.
My wife had channel 46 on initially, and normally I would be happy with their coverage, but without an experienced meteorologist like Gene Norman really hurt them. Dagmat Midcap was embarassing, as her lack of knowledge really showed. 46 needs to hire someone who knows what they're doing.
 
Everyone has their own preferences. After all taste is subjective. However, it is tough to argue the fact that WXIA has been all over the recent storms. Faster to break in and devoting more resources to it.
 
WSB TV may have been late, but their weather software kicked ass today. It showed suspended hail in storm clouds, funnel pattern in storm clouds - all with fantastic looking graphics. Burns and Nitz tag teamed non-stop (I didn't see a commercial) from sometime Saturday morning until after 5pm. Ken Cook did a good job with what he had, but when you have such a superior tool in your arsenal, I have to say 2 won the day - not even close. 11's coverge was ok, but their maps and narrative weren't compelling either.
 
If you like the over-kill graphics, just wait until WSB gets the idea to upgrade their own radar with the new dual-polarazition technology. Every 5 seconds, dual-pole this, HD that..... 5 seconds they could be talking about the storms.
Besides that, everything else was fine. The big 3 (2, 5, & 11) did good.
 
jimbo722 said:
I always prefer Fox5's coverage, and last night was no exception.
My wife had channel 46 on initially, and normally I would be happy with their coverage, but without an experienced meteorologist like Gene Norman really hurt them. Dagmat Midcap was embarassing, as her lack of knowledge really showed. 46 needs to hire someone who knows what they're doing.
Click to expand...

So you are ok with watching House when homes down the street from you are destroyed? Fox 5 News should have stayed on live.
 
deadman said:
jimbo722 said:
I always prefer Fox5's coverage, and last night was no exception.
My wife had channel 46 on initially, and normally I would be happy with their coverage, but without an experienced meteorologist like Gene Norman really hurt them. Dagmat Midcap was embarassing, as her lack of knowledge really showed. 46 needs to hire someone who knows what they're doing.
Click to expand...

So you are ok with watching House when homes down the street from you are destroyed? Fox 5 News should have stayed on live.
Click to expand...

I turned my TV on 10:00 not knowing anything about the weather and first turned on WSB and they had 20/20 on? Turned over to Fox and they had one of their reporters on the phone from the Westin? If WSB was so concerned about your safety why were they not live at 10:00 still tracking the weather?
 
Would WXIA consider upgrading their weather equipment to match or exceed WSB? WGCL has a good weather graphics package, but the knowledge as stated earlier was not there.

One thing to note, is that this came close to the weather coverage we saw years ago when Atlanta/North GA got a lot of tornados. However, it still did not match the coverage we had back then. Usually they only report on storms within the 15 county metro area even though their coverage far exceeds that with cable outlets.
 
WSB's radar can not be upgraded to Dual-Pole, it's made by a different company and is too old and too expensive to upgrade.
 
While their radar unit itself (inside the radome) might not be upgeadable, Baron has been awarded the NWS contract to upgrade all the NWS sites, so they could presumably use the data from that on their Baron-delivered network of NWS at TV station radars around the country.
 
I thought WSB's radar was a Baron's?
Dual-Pole is pretty sweet. I finally got to see it in action last month in Tampa when I went to visit my grandmother.
The software I use to access the NWS radar data just got updated to handle the upcoming dual-pole data.
 
WSB does use Baron, but the NWS contract does not (to my knowledge) cover TV station owned radar sites (like WSB's in Haralson County). It does, however, cover NWS-owned radar sites (like the NWS Site in Peachtree City, KFFC). So presumably with a software upgrade, WSB could use the FFC dual-pole data once FFC upgrades and starts sending it out.

Sounds like you yourself use Gibson Ridge products. In that case, you know StormTracker2 3D's "real" name. ;) I use it myself. Quite Handy. :)
(and if I find out that I'm talking to Mike, I'll feel like a total idiot for explaining to you what you already know.)
 
No, I'm not Mike, and I actually I use one of Gibson's competitors ;D ... And I would like to know the real name to StormTracker2 3D...... :D
 
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