Faribault resident Brian Klier was in eighth or ninth grade when an ice storm stopped his school bus in its tracks. Students had to walk home in the storm.
Luckily for Klier, his father had been following the bus. The Kliers invited many of the students into their home to wait out the storm, demonstrating a spirit for community service that hasn’t subsided.
Klier runs the social media pages for Rice County Skywarn, a citizen-run group that tracks and records all things weather. In addition to alerting the public of extreme weather events on the social media pages, he also notifies the National Weather Service and the Rice County dispatchers of what’s happening on the ground.
Klier’s latest service to Faribault is filling in the gaps in National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s data. NOAA’s website features a tool with temperature data from nearly every day between 1895-2011.
“It’s a sort of composite of records from various sources that they merged together and did quality-assurance reviews on,” Klier said. “This process was done to create temperature records for Rice County from 1895-2011. Getting data for after that in a format that can be analyzed? Really tough. You can pull up pages on the internet that will give you weather data for a single date, but a spreadsheet of high and low temperatures for years on end? Not so easy.”
However, Klier has a trick up his sleeve. On a clothesline in his yard, a Davis Vantage Pro 2 has gathered a myriad of data every five seconds since March 2011. It transmits that data onto his computer and a control panel for the machine in Klier’s home.
After months of coding data-analysis programs, learning how to extract outliers from large groups of data with pivot tables in a spreadsheet and using a combination of his own data with NOAA’s historical data, he is able to see the hottest and coldest temperature on any given day of the year.
“One thing that stuck out to me when compiling this data is that weather is very cyclical, and tends to regulate itself,” he said. “There have been very warm winters and very cold winters and very hot summers and very mild summers. We’re certainly not Hawaii here. This is Minnesota, and we certainly get a huge range of temperatures here.”
His data indicates that two days this week broke all-time heat records. A record-high temperature of 57 degrees Fahrenheit was set on Wednesday, beating the previous record of 48 degrees on Jan. 31, 1989. Another record was beat on Monday, when the high was 50 degrees, which ended the 128-year old record of 47.
This data helps people in many ways, from a grassroots level, up to the government level.
“I haven’t yet researched the best places to provide this data to aid in other’s research, but when I do, I want to make sure it’s available for free and in the public domain,” he said.
He is sometimes asked how the evolution of technology has made his job easier compared to when he found his interest in storm spotting?
“I love this question because it makes me laugh about how good we have it now,” he said. “… They only had county outlines displayed for the Twin Cities metro area, so we had to make our best guess to exactly where Rice County cities were on the radar. Only the northern border of Rice County was displayed. This is what we used both at home and in the Rice County Sheriff Department’s Emergency Operations Center to determine when we could expect thunderstorms to arrive and what their intensity was.”
Technology like near-instant radar generation that can be done on a phone or computer has made things much snappier, when it comes to weather alerts.
“These new technologies have helped us increase the warning time for severe thunderstorms and tornadoes,” he said. “And now that critical alerts can make cellphones all go off at once, it has undoubtedly saved lives and will continue to do so.”
Klier said data collection is one of his favorite tasks, but it isn’t the most rewarding part, though it is one of his favorites.
No fatalities
Klier continued in the footsteps of his father, Don Klier, who storm spotted for many years.
After going with him several times to watch various types of storms, he bought his first ham radio at just 13 years old. These can be used to transmit information about what’s happening on the ground to Rice County personnel during a major weather event. Nowadays, that’s mostly happening online, which Klier helped make a reality for the county.
But he had no idea how important the quicker communication would prove to be in 2018.
It was an eerie sight near Cedar Lake. Klier was driving to his parents’ house to make sure they were OK (they were) following multiple tornadoes hitting the area and causing major damage.
As he drove, trees stuck out of houses. Clearings filled the space that clusters of trees once stood. Klier said he later saw that the municipal airport was destroyed. A weather camera on top of Jefferson Elementary School showed trees blown sideways by the wind. He said this was the most destructive weather event in his Rice County history.
But Klier and Skywarn stepped up, as did much of the community. As the social-media guy, Klier reposted emergency assistance messages. If he saw someone offering free meals, he would share the post, for example.
This is still the only time Rice County Skywarn took on a role like this. At the end of the day though, the tornadoes of 2018 caused one minor injury, zero serious injuries and no deaths. Klier’s been told Skywarn saved lives that night.
“We lucked out a little bit,” he said. “But we also did everything that we could do to get warning out to people and to stay on top of that. That’s what I felt really, really made what we were doing worth it. When I have people coming back and saying, ‘Hey, I think you saved lives that night,’ it’s a pretty cool feeling.”
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