With convective season rapidly approaching, here's a good resource on the basics of radar, of you're so inclined: www.meteor.iastate.edu/classes/mt432/lectures/ISURadarTalk_NWS_2013.pdf
What's the high end probabilities for Friday? Closer we get to March the more I like the chances of something big going off.
Models are in decent agreement for that far out. Timing of the system looks favorable with respect to hitting during peak daytime heating. The SPC outlook looks pretty good to me. May have some initial, isolated supercells before it all goes linear. Although capping could be an issue re: more isolated stuff.
Yep. My hometown in southern Michigan is in the bullseye too. Here's the SPC day 5 risk for those that haven't seen:
Nice little collection of damage pictures in AL 1943-1974: http://www.al.com/living/index.ssf/2017/02/vintage_photos_of_tornado_dama.html
The day 3 went enhanced for central and north Indiana, south Michigan, and NW Ohio. Bet that gets upgraded by day 1
There's a definite tornado threat ahead of the main cold front too. Will be an interesting day to watch unfold
Correlation coefficient product from one of the Doppler on Wheels; the Dodge City, KS storm last May. CC measures the similarity of horizontal and vertical pulses in the radar volume; uniform rain is close to one whereas debris produces complex scattering and a much lowered value --> blue values. Perfect example of a debris signature via CC
At the moment i would say the best tornado threat is north of you. More of a damaging wind threat for you. I'll be looking closer after I make some breakfast
The day 5 is in a pretty interesting area for typical seasonal tornado development. We are starting to cook with gas fellas.
Yeah, the overall pattern + the CFS that I posted earlier + some larger scale climate indices are hinting at an active spring. We'll see how it unfolds.
Yeah, not sure what we get here but I'm hoping we avoid a monster storm in town. Flipped my Ranger into an F150, didn't think about the garage until I realized the front end of this truck is as wide as the door. Gonna suck so much if we get hail. Gonna have to drive away from the storm to save my windshield and hood
I don't write the policies, I just show up and say yep thats hail damage (but I don't do cars theres no money in that)
Yeah, I haven't looked too closely at the coming days, but the large scale pattern looks favorable. Yesterday, the models overdid the moisture and instability while the wind profile didn't quite pan out. That said, I still would have expected more wind and hail reports
The day 4 has a large 30% hatched area in Dixie alley up to Tennessee valley. Storm season appears to be here:
Here's the forecasted moisture return (surface dew points) for the upcoming severe risk - from 1 model. You can see a lot on this map. Begins this morning and runs through Tue (Feb 28) evening. You can see the moisture steam northward from the gulf. Can also see evidence of a dryline type feature in West Texas; moisture surges eastward during the day, and "sloshes" westward at night. Wish I could have been able to overlay surface winds too, but you can get a sense based on the change in dew points
Sight risk now today from DFW to Shreveport. A few interesting cells going up now just south of DFW. Mainly hail risk, but tornado threat is the. Best low level wind shear is north along the tx-ok border though
Oh man, tomorrow is tricky. High clouds, large scale lift (need lift for precip) delayed until later on the day/evening. Looks like the severe threat will also poke up into the Indy and Chicago areas too. If you get any discrete storms to fire, they'll have plenty of shear to work with; very potent environment.
Today's outlooks are decent. Looks like it's expected to miss me now but it's definitely very warm and humid here currently. I believe bertwing is pretty close to if not inside the hatched area of both maps though Tornado Hail
Of course, the Chicago radar went down yesterday and parts won't be there for a few days. Great timing... Hatched Tornado outlook for today
A few of the mets that originally mocked the setup backed off and are now saying there could be some fast moving discrete supercells in front of the dry line.
Yep...I'm in stl and the local guys seem to be more concerned with pop up storms during rush hour than the overnight weather. Pretty significant cloud cover right now.
Days like this are the reason I have always wanted to be a met/went back to school. That said, I dread the fact that ppl may die before all is said and done. Today could get bad, we'll see. The environment is already primed and it's still early. If we can get enough lift in IL/MO/AR ahead of the main front, oh boy
I've mentioned cloud cover being an issue before, but a recent study found that the high level cloud cover/Cirrus helped prevent widespread storms on may 3, 1999. It promoted only discrete storms. Lol this shit can get so complicated. Too much cloud cover = bad, just right clouds = good.
I'm about 30 minutes northwest of stl and the area they're more concerned with is about 30 minutes south but I still told my wife she can't keep her hair appt tonight. Try to save a couple hundred bucks and me pretending like I can notice a difference lol.