Chinook

possible tornado at MN/WI border

06z update- upgrade to Moderate. some highlights here: highly unstable and sheared forecast sounding in northwest Wisconsin (3km NAM) in advance of the convective line

Loveland was up to 94-99 degrees today, effectively the hottest recent day. South Dakota was up to 109 degrees east of Rapid City. Many areas of the central states now have heat advisories. The wildfire smoke is in many areas of the country. Smoke may still be affecting surface air quality here, but I'm not quite sure. Good news coming up! The models have substantial rainfall for the West for the weekend. Friday should become rainy for the Colorado mountains, and it should spread eastward. A monsoon moisture surge will combine with a weak cold front or maybe just some weakness in the upper level ridge.

Tornado at Armada, MI

The West Pacific seems to be roaring back to life after a weak year last year and a weak spring/early summer. Typhoon In-Fa is east of Taiwan now at 85 kt (JTWC). As mentioned, this will mostly affect islands between Taiwan and Japan as it weakens. There may be another typhoon quite soon, away from land.

Higher monsoon rainfall has been increasing as of lately, with some areas of Arizona and New Meixco, and Rocky Mtn National Park being above normal precipitation for this month up to this date. It seems that rainfall will be widespread in the next 2 days, for much of the same areas already described.

The surface smoke amount hasn't been too bad for a couple of days, but upper-level smoke is more dense. just a few minutes earlier. I did a slight contrast adjustment on this one

sunset 7/18 sunset 7/13

radar image from 2:53 Eastern Time, south of Barrie, Ontario

From NWS WPC and NWS Las Vegas

Rainfall totals of 6-14" near the coast of Texas in the last 3 days

This is pretty bad

this is more impressive direct wind observations at the surface

update: Measured winds of 37 kt gusting to 53 kt at Buoy 42023, at the comma head of the storm

Measured winds of 31 kt gusting to 41 kt at Buoy 42023, at the comma head of the storm

A small rain shower hit us before sunset on Friday. These are some of my best sunset color pics in recent memory.

from the Caribbean radar composite from this web site https://www.barbadosweather.org/BMS_Radar_Composite_Resp.php#

I won't put this in the "serious" Hurricane Elsa discussion

link to a pretty useful Caribbean composite radar loop https://www.barbadosweather.org/BMS_Radar_Composite_Resp.php#

Not a whole lot of rain happened at I-25. As for me, only light to moderate rain happened a couple of times. As per usual, flash flood watches in western areas have few spots that have heavy rain on any given day. Maybe we will turn things around and get some better rainfall in July.

Pueblo doesn't get very much rain or snow on average, but sometimes there is a highly organized (tornado warned) supercell such as this

There has already been some localized heavy rain at Greeley, and some new storms near Loveland and south of DIA, and with some storm development at Denver.

I don't think my place got a single flash flood watch last year. Some CAM models have maximums of 1.25" to 1.75" near Denver today. The current HRRR has a variable 0.55" to 1.0" for Denver city in the next 18 hrs.

After I checked NOWDATA on the NWS Seattle web site, Sea-Tac got to 108 degrees on Monday, breaking an all-time high of 103 set on July 29, 2009. If you read this image, it says that the 108 breaks the Seattle record by only 4 degrees, so I'm not really sure how there's a discrepancy.