LEXINGTON, Ky. (LEX 18) — To any meteorologist of a certain age, and to anyone who had to endure it, there is one weather day that stands out above all others: April 3, 1974.
"It's the Mount Everest. It's the Kentucky Derby of all weather. It's the biggest event of all. It changed profoundly everything we do that you do. Everything I do at the weather service. We went from vacuum tube radars to Doppler weather radars."
That's John Gordon, the meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service office in Louisville, describing the Super Outbreak of tornadoes from April 3rd, 1974, an event that remains unprecedented in its scope and ferocity.
Tornadoes haven't changed in the last 50 years, but how we gather and disseminate severe weather information has as he describes a weather office from back then.
"Smoke filled. They had maps up on the wall. They hand analyze. You bring a coloring box to work, vacuum tube radars. Uh, fax machines over here printing out the maps. You had eight track weather radios that were gonna come after this event. so you didn't even have that. The communications was a phone. There was no internet. There was nothing," said Gordon. "So April 3rd. normally the procedure back then was they waited until something was touched down to issue."
The human eye was the primary weather tool for obtaining information from first responders and ham radio operators stationed around a county.
"Yeah, the storm spotter program, the sky warn program, was a way to relay what they were seeing and what they're being trained to send in those reports. I see rotation. I see in-flow. I see the rear flank downdraft. I see whatever it is. Hail! big hail that day too," said Gordon.
In 1974, that could be a cumbersome process; remember, there were no cell phones, just radios. What used to take minutes now takes seconds, and seconds save lives.
"Alright, we're going to issue Lincoln County, we're going to go tornado. We put it in Slack, and mesoanalysis says good to go. We issue it and it goes out in a span of less than a minute," said Gordon.
And what else has changed since 74?
"I'm glad you asked that. I thought the best system was March 2, 2012. We told everyone this is the day. That's all I had to say. The Governor was on the call…this is the day. What was different with 2012 versus 74, in 2012 UK dismissed, EKU dismissed, schools across the state dismissed. That did not happen in 74," said Gordon.
