The meeting was held at the National Weather Service Office in Jackson. Speakers at the meeting included Alan Gerard, Corey Mead, Pete Wolf, Paul Croft, and Rusty Pfost.
Meeting Minutes
The first meeting for the academic year 1997/98 was held on Tuesday, 23 September 1997 at the NWS Forecast Office at Jackson International Airport. Chapter President Paul Croft conducted the meeting, with 11 members attending. New business included a discussion on a local chapter poster presentation at the 78th AMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, in January 1998. The membership decided to create a poster based on four papers by local members in the September 1997 special issue of Weather and Forecasting (Wea. Forecasting, 12, 377-580) on the Southern Region. Members discussed a possible local chapter special service award of meteorology scholarship named in honor of Susan Oakley, a teacher at the antebellum Oakley Institute in Jackson who was responsible for having her female students take the first recorded weather observations for Jackson from 1849 to 1855.
Chapter Vice President Alan Gerard introduced the program for the meeting, which was devoted to the contributions from authors from the Jackson chapter to the Southern Region Special Issue of Weather and Forecasting. Corey Mead, author of “The Discrimination between Tornadic and Nontornadic Supercell Environments: A Forecasting Challenge in the Southern United States” (pp. 379-387), spoke on his research concerning good meteorological parameters that discriminate between supercells that produce tornadoes and those that do not. Pete Wolf, coauthor of “VIL Density as a Hail Indicator” (pp. 473-478), spoke on the use of VIL density, which he said is the vertically integrated liquid of a thunderstorm divided by the thunderstorm echo top, and its relationship to hail occurrence and size. Paul Croft, lead author of “Fog Forecasting for the Southern Region: A Conceptual Model Approach” (pp. 545-556), spoke on his research, showing typical soundings in the central Gulf Coast region for advection and radiation fog and his model for its operational forecasting. Finally, Rusty Pfost, coauthor of “Bookend Vortex Tornadoes Along the Natchez Trace” (pp. 572-580), which Alan Gerard, spoke on their radar study of a bow echo and associated “comma head” in west Mississippi that produced tornadoes.
Minutes submitted by Rusty Pfost.
Central Mississippi Chapter of the NWA and AMS 