Storm damage near Memorial Parkway in Huntsville, AL following the Nov. 15, 1989 tornado.
Image courtesy NOAA Photo Library
Nov. 15, 1989
The Beginnings of Baron Services
As Chief Meteorologist at an NBC affiliate in Huntsville, AL, I thought we were equipped to handle the worst that severe weather could throw at us. A rare F-4 tornado ravaging downtown Huntsville in November, 1989, however, proved all of us in the weather community wrong; in fact, most of what we knew about the tornado came from a police observation of one "on the ground" reported over the scanner. Obviously, the technology to do what we needed just wasn't there.
We lost 23 citizens in that one storm. There had been no warning, and no way for us to find out the tornado's current location, size, movement—any specific information that could help us alert those in harm's way. What we needed to save lives were weather tools. What we had were weather gadgets that looked good, but paid scant attention to accuracy or timeliness.
Storm damage near Memorial Parkway in Huntsville, AL following the Nov. 15, 1989 tornado.
Image courtesy NOAA Photo Library
When Baron Services was incorporated two months later, the disaster had naturally generated a new question for us, "How can we do better?" In working through that question, we soon specified three key areas where we would direct the new company's focus:
Typically, all these areas had to come together within a 10-minute window in order to save lives—to provide the public with enough time to seek shelter from incoming storms. Over the past couple years we've added "Prediction" to the group as will be explained in the section on the Baron Tornado index, but Prediction, Detection and Dissemination (in order to generate proper) Response has continued to be the company focus..