September 18, 2012 Meeting

The first meeting of the 2012-13 year took place at the National Weather Service Jackson office. During the meeting, nominations and elections were held for the chapter year.

Meeting Minutes

Call to Order
The first NWA/AMS meeting of 2012-2013 year started at 7:05 p.m. and was opened by Chapter Corresponding Secretary Eric Carpenter. The Chapter meeting was held at the NWS office in Flowood, MS.

Rolls
Treasurer Joanne Culin left out a sign in sheet for attendees to sign. Ten people were present, including four of the returning officers.

Minutes Approval
Treasurer, Ms. Joanne Culin, advertised collection of dues and gave the incoming balance report. Once officer nominations were done, dues were collected by the new Treasurer, Mr. Jason Brand. As usual, dues are $20 for adults, $10 for students. In Ms. Nancy Lopez’s absence, Ms. Culin took minutes.

New Business
Mr. Eric Carpenter opened the meeting with everyone going around the room and introducing themselves. After this was complete, officer nominations began. A few of the officer positions from last year were being vacated and depending on how the election went, additional ones were vacated as well. The first position vacated is the NWA President. Nominations were made and Joanne Culin was elected as the NWA President. Ethan Huston retained his position as NWA Vice President. Nancy Lopez takes over the role of NWA Corresponding Secretary. On the AMS side: Loren White retains the President position, Barbie Bassett remains Vice President and Alan Gerard remains Corresponding Secretary. Jason Brand takes over as Treasurer, Eric Carpenter moves into the Recording Secretary role and Daniel Lamb remains the social media/webmaster.

Meeting ideas were then discussed for the year. Prior arrangements had been made to go to WJTV this year and that seems to be set for a time in November. Additional ideas include: MEMA, Grand Gulf, Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg (both seem to be an issue due to travel but otherwise there was interest in both). A potential topic for January would be to talk about dual-pol radar since that will have just been installed at the Jackson radar. An idea for a cookout in the warmer months with a speaker was suggested. Some offices do a webinar due to rising travel costs for speakers and this would be an option to consider.

The next order of business was to discuss the current webpage. When the web duties were transitioned from Joanne Culin to Daniel Lamb, many of the previous pages were lost or ill-formatted. Daniel has recreated the best he can with the webpage but suggested another format would be better if duties were transitioned again due to the cumbersome way the webpage is created. He suggested using a blog format through WordPress, which would be no charge. In addition, for 20 dollars a year, we could set up an actual website which Daniel Lamb offered to pay for as long as he is the webmaster. This would be an independent site that would not be linked to either AMS or NWA and would be linked on each of their chapter websites. Chapter agreed this was a good idea. Discussion was held about the name of the website and something similar to the social media handles was decided upon (Central MS NWA/AMS).

The discussion turned to Hurricane Isaac and how the storm evolved and some of the services that were given with the storm. The Hurricane Isaac NWS website was shown. Discussion was held about the track and how it wobbled, with model guidance being inconsistent between the ECMWF and the GFS. It was noted that the NHC 5 day cone of uncertainty has not been very good this year with Isaac, Debbie and perhaps Beryl. Isaac was not a big tornado threat but rather caused a bit of wind damage. One problem with the wind was that it was a long duration of 40+ mph winds while a brief thunderstorm may have strong winds near 60+ mph but a shorter duration. This helped lead to more downed trees, as well as saturated soils.

A question was raised to mainly the media about the usefulness of the Hurricane Local Statement. Ethan said he liked it in that it was an easier way to get a summary of the thinking about the storm, with concise thoughts. Brad pointed out that it is a pain for forecasters to create and some examples of the length of the product was shown. Jason noted that it was helpful to have so many JAN forecasters in the chat as opposed to some other offices. It was asked how the media took the issues with getting the forecast package out on time due to the HLS/NHC products not being ingested quickly. Ethan commented that they understood this could be an issue due to the timing of the NHC advisory issuance times. He suggested it would be good to put out the main forecast package and communicate on chat the new information or that it would be updated shortly with the new information.

Adjournment
The meeting concluded at approximately 8:35 p.m. Mr. Eric Carpenter stated that Joanne Culin would type up the notes in his place and all officer positions would take over with the next meeting. The next meeting date is being planned for October.

Minutes submitted by Joanne Culin, President-elect.