Do Meteorologists Suppress Thunderstorms?: Radar-Derived Statistics and the Behavior of Moist Convection

Meteorologists and other weather enthusiasts sometimes lament that they live in weather holes—places that receive less exciting weather than do their surroundings . This belief seems to stem from countless hours spent gazing at thunderstorms on displays of radar reflectivity. To test objectively whether radar observations truly bear out this belief, the authors analyzed 6 yr of composite reflectivity from the Weather Surveillance Radar-1988 Doppler (WSR-88D) network. Statistics for 28 target cities, selected for their prominent meteorological communities, are compared with statistics for random points in the conterminous United States to see whether any of the targets is truly a weather hole or, perhaps, a hot spot—the counterpart to a hole. Holes and hot spots are defined by the frequency of convective echoes at a target relative to echoes in the surrounding region, and by the probability that convective echoes near a target were followed shortly by a convective echo at that target. The data do, indeed, ...