Weather Photos - Fact or Fiction, Part II: Hoaxes

I'd like to say that the tornado hoax last month in Benton County, Arkansas was a surprise. I'd like to say that I didn't see it coming. But the truth is, it has happened before and will happen again. It's one of the "dark sides" of "social networking" (whereby users submit stories & photos to the media, including AccuWeather.com).

Two years ago I posted a series of photos that were being circulated by email that were either faked, or had fake information attached to them. These emails still float around, and people try to upload photos of past / mislabeled storms to photo galleries such as AccuWeather.com's all the time. I've seen enough of these over the years to flag these attempts; not everyone has. Repuporsing someone else's photos is easier than faking your own, although that happens too and there have been fierce arguments on our own Photo Gallery regarding that. These types of things are somewhat more innocent (but still inexcusable) than what happened last month in Arkansas because they were tied to a past, rather than present, storm danger.

Here's how last month's situation in Arkansas went down.The NWANews.com article says that KYTV received the photo below with a report that a McDonalds had been "taken out" and posted the information to NWSChat; it does not say if they showed the photo or broadcast the info online but apparently at meteorologist at KNWA picked up the information and did broadcast it, before he realized it was a hoax. I would think that the TV station should have waited for confirmation on something as serious as that report, and certainly have been suspicious after seeing the AP copyright stamp on the photo. However, he did the right thing by posting his story on a popular Media Forum soon after.

And it wasn't just Arkansas, a similar thing happened in South Carolina three days later, with a storm spotter calling in a bogus report of damage during a tornado warning. In this case, the NWS probably didn't have a choice but to report the damage through their standard methods, which would end up reaching the media.

One good piece of news: According to the article above, the Arkansas case has been referred to the FBI. In the SC case the government appears to be reticent to bring charges, according to the SC article, though The NWANews.com article article would seem to disagree, saying "Hearst said reporting false information to a government agency is a federal crime" (of course, technically it was the TV station that reported it to the government, unfortunately). Not only is it a crime, but emergency personnel could be injured racing to the scene, as SunJournal points out.

What do you think about all of this? Leave me a Comment below.

Comments (2): Donny:

you know it really disturbs me when people give false reports...especially trained spotters... there was this one tornadic storm in texas last year it was tornado warned.. i believe it was an high precipitation supercell that on spotternetwork that the person says it was a mile wide rainwrapped tornado that leveled a house- well while i believe that there was likely a tornado on that unless you have good vision no way you can see it especially with the mesocyclone being wrapped in rain- i dont have the date on that but it stirred up quite a bit of stuff in the spotter/chaser community- same instance in Georgia October 24th 2008 Time Location County State Lat Lon Comments 2255 2 N TARBORO CAMDEN GA 3104 8181 A STORM SPOTTER REPORTED SEEING A TORNADO WHICH GENERATED DEBRIS THAT RESULTED IN DAMAGE TO HIS CAR WINDSHIELD WHILE DRIVING NEAR NEW POST ROAD AND HIGHWAY 252. THE SPO (JAX)

whats interesting...note how detailed the report is- but what i find interesting is that there was no injuries, and that there car wasnt flipped or thrown of the side of window- i have personally seen winds as low(and i do stress it loosely) as 75-80 mph flip big rigged trucks over and stuff- so does this mean it was a false report- no- but as mentioned its kinda strange..

have a happy 4th of July Mr. Ferrel

Posted by Donny | July 1, 2009 1:05 PM Keri:

I love when hoaxes like this get busted.

A couple months ago a coworker of mine circulated some of Mike Hollingshead (from ExtremeInstability.com)'s storm photos in a email. The guy had found them online with a false caption and sent the email to almost a dozen people unwittingly retelling the bogus story.

Of course, readers of your blog would have immediately blown the story. I did exactly that, hitting "reply all" and routing everyone to Mike's legitimate website. I know the person who sent them to us was just trying to show us something cool... but in the age of the internet people need to take responsibility for the content they send out to make sure it is legitimate and that the originator is being properly credited. You can't believe everything you read!

Posted by Keri | July 1, 2009 12:49 PM