[MilCom] Re: Sonic Booms Rock Amarillo

[Steve Douglass]

Readers of this list might recall last Thursday that Amarillo was 
rocked by a series of booms that scared citizens and cracked a few 
windows. I wasn't at home the time it happened (5:20 PM) and was 
unable to monitor MILCOM to see who might have been the culprit. The 
next day, after the booms were reported widely on the local TV 
stations, the  Air Force released a statement.  This is how it was 
reported on a local TV station's website: newschannel10.com

>  You might have heard the loud noise and felt the shaking in north 
>Amarillo Thursday, as Newschannel10 first told you it was in fact 
>caused by four fighter jets on their way back to their base in Fort 
>Worth. 
   
The F16's were training at the Utah Test Tactics Missile Range when 
their Colonel told them to get home as soon as possible. 
   
As they flew back to the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base in Fort 
Worth, severe weather in the forecast prompted their commander to ask 
them to fly close to supersonic speeds, a procedure normally only 
used in emergency situations.

Colonel Ken Bachelor is the Special Operation group commander at the 
base. He told Newschannel10 "We should have maybe avoided the 
overflight of Amarillo in hindsight, but at 40 thousand feet we felt 
like the most you would hear was a soft rumble". < end snip.

Now me never being one to take the military's word on things such as 
sonic booms,  decided  to do some checking. I  went through the 
NWS/NOAA imagery archives at: http://www.goes.noaa.gov/srchwest.html 
and pulled up the satellite imagery at the time of the booms.

No severe storms were located anywhere in the area.  There was a 
large spinning low pressure area in Kansas and and severe storms in 
Oklahoma, but none in the Amarillo or Ft Worth area.

To be sure there weren't any small storms that might not sow up on 
the GOES satellite images, i decide to check the storm reports 
archives at the Storm Prediction Center : 
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/climo/reports/060921_rpts.html

Again no severe storms reported in the Amarillo or Ft Worth area or 
anywhere in between.

Draw your own conclusion here.

-Steve Douglass


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