MIKE MOSS SAYS:        Candace,        First off, welcome to the area and I hope you and your family have a nice time while you're stationed here (I spent three years at Pope AFB, myself). Tornadoes are certainly not unheard of in your area, but they are quite rare, tend to affect a very small area, and the great majority fall into the "weak" classifications that tend to produce some property damage but very few injuries. Just to put some numbers on it, Moore County has reported 13 tornadoes since 1950. Two of those were F2 intensity, which is at the lower end of the "strong" category. The other 11 were classified as weak F0 or F1 storms. Those thirteen tornadoes were responsible for 3 injuries and no fatalities.

Of course, even with such a low overall risk, there is always the outside chance a strong or violent tornado could form in your area, so it is a good idea to have a pre-planned response

MIKE MOSS SAYS:         Jerry,    Thanks for your confidence, and also for the feedback about the Interactive Radar Beta. We do expect to be making changes to that feature as time goes on, some of which have been suggested by viewers and web visitors like yourself. As you mentioned, it would be a nice improvement to have the image area remain the same when the page is refreshed and when new radar data paints onto the screen. Another suggestion that we've received and think is a good idea is having users be able to save one or more personal "favorites" so that if they have family somewhere or a vacation home they'd like to be able to quickly check on, etc, they can go right to that location. We've made the programmers who created the application aware of these ideas and they agree that those would be positive changes. We were advised that they may not be "quick fixes," though, so there may be a bit of a wait before

MIKE MOSS SAYS:       Jan,      There isn't a real well-defined, standardized term for that that we can think of. Some common phrases that came to mind around the office include things like leading outer rain bands, forward edge, outer windfield, forward fringes, etc.

MIKE MOSS SAYS:       Jason,      The lightning detection networks in the United States are privately operated enterprises and the data that we show on some of our weather maps are available only for near-realtime display, so we can not save the data or make it available through our web site. Archived data and forensic products are only available through the vendors that own the networks, and require a fee to access. The two lightning networks in place at this time are

http://www.uspln.com/index2.html

which does not appear to have a lightning forensics capability in place as yet, and

http://thunderstorm.vaisala.com/

At this address, you'll find a map of recent lightning strikes, and a "StrikeNet" feature. By registering for StrikeNet, you can request a report showing archived lightning data for a specified location and date. According to the FAQ (see the link at http://www.vaisala.com/weather/products/lightning/dataarchivereports/strikenetfax)

MIKE MOSS SAYS:          Tina,        Once a thunderstorm produces a tornado, it becomes severe by default whether it satisfies the other criteria for severe storms (hail of .75 inch or greater diameter and/or wind gusts reaching 58 mph or greater), so in that sense the answer to your first question is no. In another sense, and this may be what you were getting at, it is possible for a storm to be less than severe up until it produces a tornado, if the storm suddenly intensifies enough to do so, or in some more esoteric circumstances the storm might produce brief, weak tornadoes of two types sometimes referred to as "gustnadoes" and "landspouts." It's conceivable that these kinds of tornadoes might occasionally form without exceeding the 58 mph threshold. Then, you would have a non-severe storm with a tornado - however, this is pretty much meteorological hair-splitting and stretching things