Dwight Silverman

The SCW Q&A: Heat deterrent, NWS cuts, sprinkler tips, tornado topography

We’re back with a new Q&A! Eric and Matt have had their hands full with their day jobs the past couple of months, and that is likely to continue, so consider these kinds of posts “occasional” rather than monthly going forward.

Got a question of your own for our next round? Leave it in the comments, or drop it into the Contact link on the home page. We may also troll our Facebook page for Qs that we can A.

– Dwight

Q. What does the temperature being so hot this early do to the hurricane season this summer?

A. The average temperature in May was 3.2 degrees above normal in Houston, and nearly 2 degrees above normal in June. Part of the reason for this is that sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico are warmer than normal. (This influences local air temperatures, especially at night).

A warmer Gulf, of course, means that any passing hurricane or tropical storm will have more energy available to support intensification over water. So in that sense, warmer temperatures are more favorable for stronger hurricanes. However, aside from that connection, there is nothing I am aware of that links air temperatures in Texas in early summer to making the region more prone to hurricanes in a given season.

– Eric

Sea surface temperature anomaly map as of June 29. (NOAA)

Q. I’ve seen your posts about local forecast issues because of weather service cuts, but I haven’t seen much about how it might affect hurricane forecasting in general. Can you address this?

A. Like just about everything, the real answer to this question is somewhat nuanced. Simply put, we rely on a lot of data from NOAA and the National Weather Service to inform our forecasting. So any cuts to their services or data would be problematic. Despite all the noise around budget cuts and such, thus far, there have only really been 2 significant items of note that could negatively impact actual hurricane forecasts right now.

First is the loss of routine weather balloon launches collecting upper air data across parts of the middle of the country. We covered the impacts of this at The Eyewall in detail back in March. In short: If those weather balloon launches remain on hiatus with active storms in the Gulf, that could negatively impact the forecast of the tropical storm or hurricane track enough so that we would want to “pad” our forecasts by a few extra miles on either side of the cone.

Secondly, news that came down late last week is more important and troublesome. We also covered that at The Eyewall. In a nutshell, a Department of Defense satellite is nearing the end of its life. Last week, they announced data would cease on Monday from a particular instrument on that satellite that is critical to hurricane forecasting. Early Monday it was reported that the satellite instrument had been granted a reprieve until the end of July. This Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder (SSMIS) helps meteorologists see through the clouds in tropical systems, allowing them to make much better intensity estimates. The loss of that data will lead to somewhat poorer initialization data on storm intensity and location, which could impact every model we use to forecast. While there are some fallback measures in place, it goes without saying that that is a huge loss. Unfortunately, aside from questionable communication of the decision from the government, this seems like just a poorly timed coincidence more than anything.

Neither kneecaps us this hurricane season in terms of forecasting, but it will make us think twice about being highly confident in any given scenario, even within a day or two of landfall.

Related to this, is that the administration’s proposed budget for NOAA was formally given to Congress on Monday, and it basically destroys the entire infrastructure of weather research in America. That’s a much bigger threat than anything done so far, and it would without question set weather forecasting and research in this country back years.

– Matt

Q. Last year I moved into a house with a yard for the first time in my adult life. I lived in a townhouse for almost a decade and one of the things that attracted me to it was not having to take care of a lawn. Unfortunately I’ve gotten to where I was really struggling to live in a two story. I have someone who cuts the grass and amazingly have been able to get away with not watering yet, but I know it’s coming. So any hints? How do I know when it needs it? How long to run the sprinkler? What time of day is best?

A. Well, you’ve picked a good year to have a lawn. March and April were fairly dry months for most of the region, but we had not yet reached the real growing season for lawns yet. By the time warmer temperatures started to arrive in May, we began to see regular rains. The pattern continued into June when we have seen plenty of rain. So far, so good, in terms of not needing a sprinkler this year. But July and August are looming, and I doubt we’ll get through the next two months without needing to water lawns.

As a general rule, I find that if a yard in full sun receives a soaking rainfall, it can go about 7=10 days before needing to be watered. Areas in partial shade can go several days longer. There is no secret about when grass needs to be watered. First it will start to wilt, then the grass will appear to be thinner and weaker as it dries out. The ground will be hard. This is the last step before grass begins to brown and dry out. You need to water the grass before it turns brown, because then it will be too late.

A man and his mower.

In terms of amount, I find that 20 minutes every three days works pretty well. Early morning is best. Please note I am far from a lawn expert, but I do have a quarter of a century of experience keeping a lawn alive in Houston.

– Eric

Q. Is it true that flat land is more prone to tornados? I know the area around St. Louis has some flat land. And we do get some tornados here. Does Houston’s urban landscape, with lots of tall buildings, protect us at all?

A. There are a number of persistent myths about tornadoes that have withstood the test of time for one reason or another. First, tornadoes seem to be more common over flat land because a number of tornadoes that are visually documented in the most dramatic fashion tend to occur in the Plains, which are generally flat.

I mean, it’s tough to beat an image like that. But reality is nuanced! Tornadoes have occurred in all 50 states, and what determines where tornadoes most likely occur is less about terrain and more about large scale weather and climate patterns, which is why the Plains and Southeast tend to lead the country in tornado events. But at a local scale, some areas can be somewhat more favorable than others due to topography. For example, we’ve seen a few examples of tornadoes impacting near Pikes Peak in Colorado in recent years, including just last month!

Tornadoes have occurred even higher in elevation in Colorado including a 2012 Mount Evans tornado at nearly 12,000 feet.

Two places near where I’ve lived have some topographical features that can produce enhancement of tornado risk: Parts of southeastern Pennsylvania have mountains to the west and Delaware Bay to the southeast, which almost acts like a much smaller scale version of the Rockies and Gulf respectively in feeding a miniature tornado alley. In Upstate New York, added “twist” to the wind north of Albany because of the intersection of the Mohawk and Hudson Valleys can add a little extra “oomph” to tornadoes there too, an area that is more hilly than flat.

Houston’s urban landscape does not really protect us. While it may act to locally enhance or “shadow” certain thunderstorm impacts, the downtown skyscrapers are not immune to tornadoes. A tornado went through downtown in 1970. Granted it was fairly weak. But Houston’s tornado history is littered with generally lower-end tornadoes in all corners of the city. Other major downtowns that have been hit by tornadoes include Nashville, Fort Worth, Miami, Los Angeles (yes, for real), Salt Lake City, Atlanta, and more.

So downtown skyscrapers offer no real protection. The reasons downtown areas get hit so infrequently overall is simply a matter of luck and math. The footprint of rural land is much greater than that of urban land. So the odds of an urban center being struck by a tornado are automatically much lower than an open field or farmland in the Plains. And it’s why tornadoes that hit cities tend to get covered significantly in the media, simply because more people and structures are impacted.

Bottom line: Tornadoes can occur virtually anywhere and cityscapes and elevation in most cases don’t offer protection. The causes of tornadoes are because of atmospheric ingredients and geography, sometimes buoyed by local effects of topography.

– Matt

Surviving Houston’s heat and houmidity, according to you

Last week Eric offered a tip for Houston-area newbies for surviving Houston’s fearsome heat and houmidity. (And no, that’s not a typo.) That inspired many of you to offer your own suggestions for dealing with summer. We’ve compiled the best of the best so you can work on your climatological coping skills.

As a native of SE Texas, summer is hot and that’s the fact, Jack! But…I have found that, if I talk or complain about the heat in June or July, that just seems to prolong the summer unnecessarily. Instead, I avoid those water cooler conversations about the heat…until August, then I let it all hang out! Because sometimes fronts start making their way into H-Town a few weeks into September, and it cools down to like 88 degrees and everyone starts thinking it’s fall and pulls out their sweaters! This strategy of denial means you only have a month in a half of hot weather…August and maybe half of September! All our our newly arrived neighbors thank me when I share this strategy with them!

– Sharron Cox

Even as the sun sets on the Memorial Park Eastern Glades, it’s still pretty toasty. (Dwight Silverman photo)

I don’t know if it truly helps any, but my psychological trick to get through the summers recently has been to count the weeks instead of the days. 9 weeks til September just on some psychological level feels better than 74 days. Maybe it’s because by this point, we’re typically mowing once a week, and I really don’t wanna by the time August comes around. And I know we’re getting close to only needing to do single digit cuts left.

– Josh Sorensen

Face the heat head on. Go outside for a walk at 3 PM. Go for a run in the morning and greet the rising sun. Lay in the grass at 2 PM. Feel the radiation. Sweat through the humidity. Learn to love that which we cannot change. This is the best way to deal with summer heat in Houston. Before you know it, you will think 90 degrees feels moderate. A slight breeze and you will have goose bumps. September starts to feel chilly.

– Humidity connoisseur

I am a native, and have lived in two other places, Los Angeles and Saudi Arabia. When I start to feel as though summer will never end (and honestly, it’s hot through sometimes mid November here) I remember how I felt when I stepped off the plane onto the tarmac in Dhahran, and the humidity slapped me in the face. It was 110F in the summer there with 80 to 90% humidity. I will never forget that. Houston is absolutely awful, but that was just a smidge worse (at the time – we’ll see how things change 🙁 )

– Ashley

I also try not to complain too much until August, go swimming at night to reset my body temperature, and my new summer hack is hanging out in the cheese aisle at HEB. Even colder than a movie theater and can grocery shop too.

– Cheryl Detten

August sunrise over downtown. It already looks hot, doesn’t it? (Dwight Silverman photo)

My Summer Survival Strategies:

1. Sit outside sometimes, to become acclimated, as another commenter said. The following two steps will help with this.

2. Cold iced Cafe du Monde made with tons of brown sugar and milk at 2 pm, outside. It’s the worst part of the day but you get to have coffee!

3. Wine and Chips O’Clock at 4 pm, outside. The worst part of the day’s heat is over! (I prefer white wine and potato chips.)

4. August 14: official Changing of the Morning Light Day. The sunlight in the morning changes from harsh blue-white to a softer yellow-white.

5. August 28 CHANGING OF THE LIGHT DAY!!! The light is noticably softer and golden. You have made it thru the worst. Only a month until the moveable feast that is COOL FRONT DAY!!!

Oh, and visit the gem and mineral section of the Science Museum. Like being in an ice cold glittery sparkly cave.

– Bea

One thing that gets me through the Houston summer is just knowing that for 8 months of the year between mid September and mid May the weather is actually quite decent and tolerable. Just gotta get through July and August and Fall will be right around the corner. 

– Anthony Stott

A trick I do is make it a point to get out for 20 or 30 minutes during the peak heat of the day. 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. I’ll get out and go for a motorcycle ride or do a little bit of work in the yard. Maybe just 15 minutes! lol. What this does is allows me to be absolutely scorched during that time and comparatively it makes the mornings and evenings feel much better.

– Scott Smith

Lived in Texas most of my life, especially the Houston area. Long enough to grasp the Biblical nature of this area: Dust to Dust, or Noah’s Ark.

– Shawn Harrison

If these pearls of heat-related wisdom inspire you to offer tips of your own, please do so in the comments!

The SCW Q&A: Cap busting, pancake ice, pollen week, best weather apps

It’s another just-in-the-nick-of-time edition of the Space City Weather Q&A. If only we could get a few more days added to each month, maybe we’d get this out the door sooner. Or maybe April’s edition would just end up publishing on April 33. Who knows?

Anyway, let’s get to it. As always, if you have a question for next month, drop it in the comments below or hit the Contact link on the blog home page.

Q. I’ve been noticing over the last few months. The last couple of major storms that were supposed to be severe, once they came thru Harris County were unable to break the cap. What is causing that to happen? Is this common in La Niña springs?

A. Welcome to weather forecasting, my friend. The reality is there are a lot of variables needed for storms to develop, and sometimes they’re very difficult to forecast.

You mentioned La Niña, a cooling of the tropical sea surface temperatures of the Pacific Ocean. It’s not entirely clear to me whether we’ve been in a very weak La Niña or neutral conditions since about February, so I really don’t think that’s a factor. We also have seen some pretty decent thunderstorms this spring, it’s just that all have not hit. The reality is that sometimes storms make it, and sometimes, whether it’s a lack of instability or other factor, they don’t.

I would also add that spring storm season is not over. It typically lasts through much of May before we get into a pattern more dominated by high pressure in June. If you’ll recall, the destructive derecho that hit Houston last year did so on May 16. So, like, knock on wood or something. –

–Eric

Q. A reader visiting Hamburg, NY, reached out to ask: We visited Woodlawn State Park, on Lake Erie. The “beach” had frozen iceberg formations (which was still cool to a Texas girl). Not really an iceberg, they were small frozen disc situations. But the interesting part was: the ‘iceberg’, when you ran you finger across the side: ice crystals or icicles easily poured off the side of it. So the “icedisc” (or iceberg for dramatic effect) was actually made of these ice crystals. What was going on there?

A. As the resident Upstate New York veteran, I will say that what you probably witnessed was a phenomenon known as “pancake ice!” My tell is that you said you ran your finger across it and ice poured off the side. Pancake ice usually has raised edges, so that seems to check out. Sweet as it may sound, pancake ice forms in an interesting way.

Lake Erie is the shallowest Great Lake, so it tends to freeze over in wintertime. It starts with a slushy, thin ice that forms initially. Over time, that slushy, greasy ice will thicken up and becomes what is known as nilas ice. This is where you start to see an ice sheet develop. If it gets cold enough, long enough, and the ice thickens more than 4 inches, that becomes known as “first-year ice.” It always warms up enough to melt Lake Erie’s ice, so as that process begins and we start to see more of a transition season occur, with warm spells peppered by cold blasts, that’s when some fun ice formations can occur.

Pancake Ice! (Stanisław Węsławski, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

In the case of pancake ice, you get some of that thinner ice that crashes into other thinner ice and forms disc-like shapes in rough water. Basically, the wave action smooshes some of the thinner ice together into discs. Those discs can hit other discs and you get a saucer shape with raised edges. Hence, pancake ice.

The Great Lakes are a fascinating place. Between some of the ice features, lake effect snow, lake breezes, and more, it’s a fun place to practice meteorology.

–Matt

Q. Every spring there’s this period of a couple weeks (maybe more?) when everyone’s car is covered with yellow pollen. I have two questions about this: Is the week when this starts predictable each year, like “third week in March is pollen week”? And is how long it lasts predictable, as in “when will I be able to wash my car”? Or are we at the mercy of the pollen gods every year?

A. There is essentially pollen all year long in Houston, but you’re referring to tree pollen and most particularly pollen from oak trees that cake anything left outdoors in yellow and green. There is no set period for this because when it occurs depends on the weather. A longer and colder winter will delay pollen season, and a shorter and warmer weather will cause trees to bloom earlier. Typically tree pollen season peaks during March or the first half of April, but not always.

Pollen coating cars is a sure sign of spring in Houston. Also: Achoo! (Dwight Silverman photo)

The height of oak pollen season lasts about two or three weeks, but again this duration depends on the weather. Windy conditions and heavy rain can bring more pollen down sooner, whereas mild conditions can extend the time. But the good news is that once oak pollen season is over, it’s over. And we’re left with these amazing, leafy old trees that provide shade during the long and hot summer months. I consider it a fair trade. If you’re interested in data, the city of Houston has a good website that tracks all manner of pollen in the air, on a daily basis.

–Eric

Q. I have several weather apps on my phone, and I’m kind of a weather nerd so I am always looking at others. I have the Space City Weather app, obviously, but I’m curious: Other than that one, what is is Matt’s and Eric’s favorite app and why?

My favorite free weather app that I can recommend to people without hesitation is an app called Everything Weather, by Cory Mottice, for both iOS and Android. Why do I like this app? No ads for one thing. Secondly, it’s almost entirely National Weather Service data, and immediately you are presented with any hazards for your location.

Screenshot of “Everything Weather” forecast screen. (EverythingWx)

You can see above that for Pittsburgh there is a slight risk of severe weather on this day, a marginal risk Thursday, as well as a marginal risk of excessive rainfall. You can scroll down and tap whatever day you want for a brief description of the forecast.

Scroll to the bottom and find your local NWS office’s “weather story,” which adds critical context to a daily forecast, particularly when bad weather threatens. You can also tap “AFD” at the upper left and instantly read the NWS’s technical forecast discussion for that area.

Basically, it accomplishes the rare feat of giving a ton of information to both average consumers and more sophisticated weather nerds in one app on one screen. It also has radar functionality, though no dubious rain alerts that are very hit and miss in other apps. You can also customize what threshold you want for NWS alerts, or you can say I want “Open Meteo” weather data instead of NWS.

One drawback? No push alerts that I am aware of. So if you want immediate notification of weather warnings, you’ll need to shop around.

–Matt

My favorite app is Spotify. When I was growing up I had an allowance of $10 a week and a summer job detasseling corn that paid a pittance. Between regular trips to the CD store and Columbia House, I was able to cobble together a music collection. Sometimes, when money was tight, I would resort to taping new releases played on the radio with a cassette tape. It now seems pretty magical to be able to listen to any song I want to, at any given moment, from across the history of recorded music.

Oh, wait. You meant weather app.

RadarScope is about as good as it gets when comes to showing storm information.

As always, I think RadarScope is the best weather app because it provides essential radar information during inclement storms. Never leave home without it!

–Eric

Nobody asked me, but I’ll second Eric’s RadarScope endorsement, and add that it’s available for almost every platform. For Apple users, it works on iPhones, iPads, Macs, Watch and even the Apple TV streaming box. The paid features (two tiers) give you lots of details, such as storm track and lightning strikes, and if you pay once for the Apple version, the pro features are available on all those devices. It’s also available for Android and Windows, though you must pay separately for each of those.

Want more weather apps? See my post from last July about how to use phone apps to pinpoint weather forecasts at your location.

The SCW Q&A: Warmer sooner, strong signals, gray days, NOAA endangered, communication failures

Welcome to the March SCW Q&A, where we tackle your questions about the weather, climate and how things work around here. You can submit your questions via the Contact link on the blog home page, or by leaving a question in the comments below.

Let’s get to it!

Q: Can you settle a bet for me? My friend and I have been arguing about whether it has been getting warmer sooner in Houston. He’s lived here 30 years, I’ve been here 20 years, so we both think we know what we’re talking about. I say it’s gotten warmer sooner, he says no. Do you have data to prove one of us is right? Preferably me?

A: We here at Space City Weather do not condone gambling, but in this instance, we will make every effort to ensure a victor is decided. So I guess the first way to go about this is to ask, “What is ‘warmer?'” What’s our definition? Are we talking first 80 degree day? 90 degree day? Last 40 degree night?

Let’s start with 80 degree days. The date of our first 80 degree day of the year has been steadily increasing over the last 50 years.

The top line shows the first day of 80 degree temperatures in Houston, and the 5-year moving average. It had been around February 18th in 1974, whereas today it’s closer to the last week of January. (NOAA)

In 1975, the average first 80 degree day would have occurred around February 18th. In 2025, that has moved up by over 3 weeks. For 90 degree days, it has similarly advanced forward, with the average first 90 degree day occurring around May 8th in the 1970s to mid-April today. Our last 40 degree night? In the 1970s it was April 28th. Today, it’s April 13th.

So, yes, reader. It’s not your imagination. Even if we look at this in several other ways, it has been getting warmer earlier in the year, especially in the last 30 to 50 years here in Houston.

–Matt

Q: I was wondering about long range weather forecasts. When you say there is a strong signal that a cold front or other weather event will happen 7 to 10 days out, what is the signal? Is it just a lot of data points that the models see as a pattern, maybe that it recognizes?

A: The signal is just our Spidey senses tingling. No, but seriously, this is a good question. When we’re looking out in more of the extended timeframe, we obviously don’t want to portray any degree of overconfidence in a possible forecast outcome. But not all 7 to 10 day forecasts are created equal. In some cases, you will get really good model agreement on an outcome. In other words, we’ll look at several key weather models like the GFS and European models and their ensemble means (when they’re run 30 to 50 different times with some tweaks and averaged together), and also some AI models now. If most of them agree on strong high pressure (warm and dry) or a very stormy pattern, we can say with some degree of confidence that there’s a “signal” for warmer or wetter weather. Or vice versa.

An example of a possibly high confidence signal in heavy rainfall for southwest Louisiana 5 days in advance; over 70% of European ensemble members forecasting 1″ or more of rainfall. (Pivotal Weather)

Now, there will be instances where confidence in an extended range forecast is even lower than usual.

An example of a lower confidence extended forecast where the European ensemble has a wide variance in the location of surface low pressure 8 days in advance in the Plains. (Polarwx.com)

For instance, placement of low pressure is one that is often challenging. We may know there’s a good signal for a storm at a certain timeframe, but we may not have any idea where that storm will emerge. From the image above, we would assume the Panhandle, but there is enough variability in exactly where that ends up that we have low confidence in any details.

So the bottom line here is that every extended forecast is somewhat unique and some periods will have slightly higher confidence than others. One other element that comes into play? Forecaster experience. I spent most of the last 15 years in energy trading environments working on day 10 and longer forecasts, and one of the most critical elements in trying to determine whether temperatures would trend one way or the other was just experience. You can’t track a specific metric to quantify that, but it counts for something.

–Matt

Q. Was this winter more grey than usual? It’s felt especially dreary the past couple months but I don’t know if it’s more cloudy days than usual!

A. Your intuition is good! Let’s look at December, January and February, which is a reasonable definition of winter in Houston. As part of its daily summary, the National Weather Service tabulates (on a scale of 1 to 10) whether a day was generally clear, partly cloudy, or cloudy. Here’s the total number of such days for this winter over the three-month period:

Clear: 19 days

Partly Cloudy: 39 days

Cloudy: 32 days

So by this tabulation, only 21 percent of days this winter were clear, or mostly clear, whereas 43 percent were partly cloudy, and 36 percent were cloudy. Historically, during winter, the split is just about even in Houston, with one-third of days being mostly clear, one-third partly cloudy, and one-third mostly cloudy. There is some subjectivity in measuring cloud cover across an entire area, so we can’t put too fine of a point on things. But yes, I think it’s safe to say this winter was more cloudy than normal in Houston this year But don’t worry, spring is often one of the sunniest times of year!

-Eric

Q: I am reading about mass firings at NOAA. Of course, this concerns me since we live in a hurricane prone area. What can I do as a concerned citizen? Is this situation going to affect your forecasting?

A: So there were a number of firings done to probational employees recently. Unfortunately that took out a number of experienced forecasters and researchers as well as a number of incoming younger talent. The whole thing is tied up in litigation, and some people have been hired back, others hired back and assigned to desk duty.

No matter how you view the issue, it’s really just a mess. In addition to this, a number of employees took the “fork in the road” buyout offer, and additional buyouts are expected to be in the pipeline. This has led to staffing reductions, including here in Houston where our meteorologist in charge, Jeff Evans recently departed. Between the cost-cutting and staffing reductions, we are beginning to see weather balloon data get cut now. On most days, you aren’t going to notice much or any of this. But a couple things are true: Over time, weather forecast quality is going to slowly degrade and during major events, particularly hurricanes, we may begin to notice more significant deviations from forecast because of glaring holes in the data. And this is in a world that assumes no further cuts which seems unlikely. Yes, this will impact our forecasting.

We have already written about our thoughts on keeping NOAA whole. Given the degree of success the NWS and NOAA have had in saving lives, protecting property and positively impacting the economy as a whole, the cost vs. benefit of cutting this agency may actually work against the implied goal of cutting government spending and reducing waste. In other words, these cuts would almost certainly be counterproductive and not work to achieve the stated goals of the current administration. I’m not just saying that as a result bias; the ROI of NOAA is actually remarkable and an example of a government agency being successful in ways that other government agencies should strive for. And in a place like Houston, which is the most disaster-prone region in America, we should be the ones screaming loudest to preserve it wholly.

So what can you do? Start by calling your congressional representative and explaining this. Feel free to cite our work on the matter. Educate and inform friends and family. Encourage others to speak up about it. Attend town halls with representatives. There are about eleventy billion priorities for both conservatives and liberals right now, but this is one of the rare ones that should enjoy strong bipartisan support and be non-controversial. If you need to cut debt, you don’t just take an axe to everything; you try to target your cuts to achieve the maximum cost savings with least collateral damage. And broad cuts to NOAA runs against that philosophy.

-Matt

Q. I followed your instructions from back in January about how to fix the problem of not getting notifications from your app on my iPhone, and it worked for a while. I deleted it, reinstalled it, and for a couple of weeks, notifications flowed – until they didn’t. I deleted again, reinstalled again, same thing. What’s going on?

Q. Recently, I quit getting your daily email with the latest blog posts. I’d been getting this regularly for a long time but it suddenly stopped. I re-entered my address in the field on the blog’s home page, but that didn’t help. Eventually I used another email address and that worked, but I’d really rather have your latest forecasts come to my regular address. Help!!!

A. There’s a great line from a classic Paul Newman film, 1967’s “Cool Hand Luke”: “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” It fits for us, as two of the ways we get our forecasts out are failing to communicate with some of you. For one, a real fix may be imminent. For the other … not so much.

The app notifications problem turned out to be caused by an old version of the platform our developer, Hussain Abbasi, uses to build and maintain the app. It doesn’t play nice with some of the changes Apple has made in the way notifications work in iOS/ipadOS apps, and he originally planned to move to a completely different tool next year.

But Hussain recently found that the newest version of the development platform actually will do the job, so he is in the process of updating the app with that tool. While it’s not going to be the full rewrite of the app that he’d planned, it’s still taking a while. We hope to have something for you soon. In the meantime, deleting and reinstalling the app will get you a couple of weeks of notifications. Because we don’t require a login, this is relatively painless (but still annoying!).

The email problem is tougher. Being frugal, we have been using the email system built into WordPress. It’s free, as in beer, and in theory it allows for an unlimited number of recipients. Except we have discovered that there is indeed a limit, and we appear to have it hit at 24,700.

What appears to be happening is that every time someone new signs up to get SCW emails, someone else in the email database gets kicked off the list. Re-entering your old address in the home-page form doesn’t help, but putting in a new address should. Of course, you might be kicking someone else off the system when you do!

The fix for us is to switch to a different email system, which we’d have to pay for, and given the number of users we have and the frequency of our emails, that would be very, very expensive. We continue to look at solutions for this, but for now, your patience is appreciated!

-Dwight