National Weather Service in Grand Forks hosts open house

(KNOX) – Until Saturday, the last open house at the National Weather Service office in Grand Forks was in 2019.
Jim Kaiser, warning coordination meteorologist, remembers the fall flood of 2019 as “unique and awfully amazing,” when heavy rain forced farmers to leave one-third of their sugar beets in the ground.
Weather conditions were ideal for the September 28 open house, which included an interior tour of the 27-year-old facility on University Avenue west of I-29. Mindy Beerends is one of 17 meteorologists who pledge weather support to key safety decision makers in 35 counties.
Carl Jones has been with NWS for seven years. He makes use of Warn Gen Software to generate thunderstorm and tornado warnings, using a colorized screen to measure reflectivity and wind velocity into and out from a storm cell that is developing a tornado. The data feeds a formatted warning system that KNOX picks up.
Jennifer Ritterling is in the central room filled with screens of ground-level Web cams, aviation forecasts, river level forecasts, fire danger, and the Doppler Radar north of Mayville, “the big golf ball” atop a 30-meter tower. Near the screens are phones to alert counties in North Dakota and Minnesota.
Electronics on board the NWS ship and its engine room are manned on this day by Mike Lukasz, including 16 NOAA weather radio transmitters and the “completely refurbished” Doppler Radar.
Brad Hopkins learned instrumentation from Mark Ewens, formerly of NWS and host of “Afternoons with Mark Ewens” on KNOX.
The major attraction for this open house is the launching of two weather-data-gathering balloons by UND Atmospheric Sciences.
The Grand Forks NWS office is one of 122 weather forecast centers in the United States open 24/7, 365 days of the year, meaning forecasters are working three eight-hour shifts when threatening weather is developing.
Kaiser looks back on the tornado outbreak in 2017 in North and South Dakota, “72, and we probably missed some. Then there was the EF-4 tornado that struck Northwood on a Sunday night in 2007.”
In his 18 years, there are days and nights when the National Weather Service is “dealing with something exceptional and extreme.”