We had the weather radio turned on Friday night. It is springtime in Central Texas, and weather is always a serious business. We kept the All-Hazards station on all night, with the radio on alert mode, so whenever a signal came across on the NOAA station, the radio would come on and say what the warning was.In case you are someplace far away the national NOAA warning system is a national network that reports local "hazards" which is usually weather related. And in the Spring, the Mid West and South gets pulses of alternating cold and hot weather that causes some stormy weather.

The special weather radio that we use is in standby mode, and comes on only when a special weather alert is sent out from the local stations.We have a feature that allows for entry of individual countiesWe had some tornado watches early in the evening, but it was several counties over, then a thunderstorm came up from the south and we had warnings about flash floods. So we had a restless night on Saturday. But Saturday morning dawned bright and clear, though our tomato seedlings had blown away. We had placed them carefully on a patio table for later planting, and we found the peat-moss pot in the bushes, but no tomato plants. Luckily, we have some already planted, so it is not a dust-bowl situation where the crops have vanished into the wind, but it will take several more weeks to regrow the seedlings.We learned from the television, from the eminent Doctor Greg Forbes, of the Weather Channel that Doppler radar can pick up certain signatures of tornadoes.

When we got up after a night of thunder and rain we wanted to see what happened. We were watching the Weather Channel around noon (on April 24th), when he remarked that the radar signature of the storm changed around Yazoo City, Mississippi.He used the animation, while the tornado moved across the area, to go back and forth along the time-line of the tornado and showed how the actual debris (which later turned out to be people’s homes) caused a dark spot to form in the computerized display of the rotation of the tornado.

We had never seen that before, and while it was alarming to see (especially in light of the later on-the-ground photos and videos), we have to admire the power of television to bring information nearly instantaneously to the world at large. We learned that the metal and plastic and vinyl siding and all the dirt and debris can actually be detected in real-time was something we did not know.Here is a radio that is similar to the one we have in the house. If you live in the Midwest or South, you should have a weather radio close at hand with batteries in case of power failure.