Eskimo Joe

Hurricane warning issued for the U.S. Virgin Islands.

When, if ever, do you think we will have an ice free summer in the arctic?

That was an epic few days with you, me and Anthony looking at the SREFs and ensembles.

This is quite impressive. A cool summer that has owned my garden from start to finish.

I don't know where else to put this:

Thank you for posting this. Very informative!

Very nice. Where did you get the base map?

I was in Lancaster at the time, and just completed my last undergraduate finals. Graduation was the next day, but when I saw the north trend the night before, I packed up early on the 18th and drove back to Philadelphia while the roads were still good. I was quite happy to have gotten out of there and back to Philly because my neighborhood consists of tiny streets that never get plowed in a 6" snowstorm, let alone an 18" event.

You should check out Millersville University's met program too. There are tons of undergraduate research / internship opportunities that MU can assist you with. Link to Earth Sciences dept: http://www.millersville.edu/esci/

CAPE is an acronym for Convective Available Potential Energy, and is used as a metric when identifying the potential for convection (thunderstorm activity). It must be stressed that CAPE is the end all for determining severe weather risk, but is certainly important. Remember that air must have buoyancy (ability to rise) and then condense to form clouds, rain, hail, etc and CAPE provides a measure of this buoyancy. The higher this buoyancy, the quicker air will rise and begin the formation of thunderstorms. The CAPE value is measured in Joules per kilogram (J/Kg) and, generally, you need a minimum of 1,000j/kg of CAPE to see severe weather (Blanchard, 1998). CAPE can reach values of up to 5,000J/Kg, but that is reserved for rare events, such as large scale severe weather outbreaks. Here in the Mid Atlantic a good day is when CAPE gets to ~2,000J/Kg. There are two other types of CAPE talked about in forecast discussions and severe weather outlooks: MLCAPE (Mixed Layer CAPE) and SBCAPE (Surface-Based CAPE). Unfortunately I am not adept at explaining these two terms, but if you were to Google: SPC + MLCAPE or SPC + SBCAPE there are several good snippets of information. Hope this helps! Reference: Blanchard, D. O. (1998). Assessing the Vertical distribution of Convective Available Potential Energy. American Meteorological Society, 13, 870 - 877.:

Fantastic discussion here. Also, that .gif is superb.

Very happy to hear you are okay. Here is a link that I feel will make everyone appreciate the true impact of the storm. In response to the bold text, that is typical for when the POTUS comes in. The military will practice the flight route. http://ngs.woc.noaa.gov/storms/joplin/

Could just be multiple vortices revolving around each other a la planets in a solar system.

That is just stunning.

I honestly have no idea who JoMo is, but from what I've read he lives in Joplin. Not sure what part of town so I will not speculate.

Yes, KML (Keyhole Markup Language for those not familiar with the term) has really enabled the geographically enthused population to map features in software such as Google Earth. In term of meteorology and the Joplin, MO tornado a person could take a picture of damage, reference it with standard lat/lon coordinates and then upload the file in KML format for anyone to view on the web. This really emphasizes the connection between geography and the earth sciences.

Thank you for the compliment, it's now a part of my sig Yes, I make KML files for NASA on a weekly basis. I think I'm going to hold back on the KML until I get enough data in. I considered a rough overlay of the SPC reports, but since they are in decimal degrees it's not as spatially accurate as I'd like. Disclaimer: I'm not bashing SPC at all, they do an excellent job!