Chinook

Oh my gosh, 12/19/2006 was the day before THE STORM of 12/20/2006. That was definitely juiced up with some El Nino connection to tropical moisture, as 500mb lows of that magnitude in the Southwest pretty much only happen with El Nino winters. Another great sunset. As I said before, I used to live in Ohio and Michigan and I always dreamed of watching sunsets over the Rocky Mountains. Now I can take these pictures from a place near home. On the left hand side, you can see the numerous peaks of the Indian Peaks, where many mountain peaks are about the same height and hard to distinguish. Anybody near Boulder or Denver will know what I am talking about.

Oh yeah, that's right, you are the one from Toledo OH also. Oh well, for what it's worth, I never get a fight to Toledo, because it's too expensive to fly to a minor airport. I am also glad that I am not planning to drive 1200 mi to Ohio any time soon. As a result of some of these drives, I have a lot of interest in severe storms and bad weather all along I-80. I have invented a name for I-80/I-294 in south Chicago area. (Hammond, IN, South Holland IL) I call it "Traffic Canyon." Traffic flows pretty smoothly with so many lanes.

I will be flying across the country to a certain Great Lakes city on Friday 12/21, and the newest GFS forecast has 977mb near that city, with a very large array of rain and some snow in the GL/OV. I wonder if I will have any flight delays. 977mb is notable.

sunset over the mountains (yesterday)

CFS: Clowns Forecast Sunshine (and warmth!)

Mount Baker National Forest in Washington has up to 88" in its point & click weather forecast, for just 5 days.

Perhaps this storm should be called "Carolinapocalypse"

My area had some snow yesterday, Fort Collins and Loveland got roughly 1" of snow, with a high of about 24. I almost slipped on the ice, late in the day. Today there are very clear skies, and I could see Long's Peak and the Mummy Range with only a bit of clouds over the mountaintops. In about 6 days, there is a possibility of a more northerly shortwave/ cold front and snow for Colorado. Right now, it's certainly not obvious that it will snow at low elevations. The vorticity plot looks pretty darn cool, though.

Snow % of normal now and roughly 25 days ago

If the models make a small mistake with the low-level temps, this snow north of OKC turns to ice or rain. The low-level profile here from the GFS is good for heavy snow, it's just so close to 0*C up to 700mb. The 500mb heights are so high, that the 1000-500mb critical thickness line is in Kansas, about 10 miles north of Wichita. We have a long time before this is a short-range forecast, so the models will obviously take some time to resolve the exact rain/snow line (or freezing rain/sleet profile, if that exists.)

If anybody wants to *fantasize* for Oklahoma based on 1988, check out this Jan 4th-7th 1988 storm total plot! I think I see an 18" contour in there.

GFS Ensembles/ECMWF ensembles really show above-average temps in Canada from day 5-day 10. We may have a hard time getting arctic air for storms in the Plains/Midwest for quite a number of days, in that period (Dec 7-12)

interesting note: on the SPC web page, the state of Oklahoma had 22 tornadoes from Jan 1st to Nov. 15th, and I suppose add (a big) +1 to that considering Friday night. Illinois had 22 preliminary tornado reports yesterday. Even if roughly 15-17 are confirmed out of this, Illinois still had about 3/4 as much tornadoes in one day, compared to all year in Oklahoma.

As of right now, the models have something very interesting for Oklahoma in about a week

Confirmed tornado report near Beardstown (21:31z), also a tornado reports at Brooklyn IL (near Camden IL) and Industry IL (near Macomb)