hlcater

Explosion of convection in the SW eyewall over the past 30 minutes and that band others have been talking about seems to be maintaining strength. Very interested to see what recon finds.

13 minutes ago, the ghost of leroy said:

Bad news if that inner stuff goes away and the new eye consolidates to the diameter of that moat. That would certainly make it harder to have top end wind speeds but would massively enlarge the area that could get eyewall. And that might really matter if it stalls offshore like this afternoon’s global suggest may happen. 

That outer ring doesn’t really look like an OEW to me. Too pulsy in nature. 

The EPS is a good bit to the left of the OFCL track. EPS consensus still brings it into the NC/SC border area 

2 minutes ago, mappy said:

in air recon still reporting a slight inner eye wall. not quite sure its done ERC yet. 

Thinking it is very close to being finished. Should be by midday or so. Afterwards I think this has the best shot it will have at C5, especially given the C5 winds at flight level just waiting to mix down.

Given the high winds at FL and enlarged CDO overnight, Florence is going to pick up right where it left off. Given the larger eye being more stable, it will be harder for Florence to pull of another one.

Just now, StormChaser4Life said:

Convection already exploding around the center again. Starting to look more robust again. Not sure if ewrc finished but looks improved on satellite 

Could just be the diurnal minimum encouraging renewed convection and colder cloud tops.

3 minutes ago, Stebo said:

Horribly misanalyzing models over and over while wishcasting something for NYC.

Or charleston.... This particular individual has it all figured out. It's bad everywhere. 2-3x worse than irma or maria. It's not just here.

. 

Gotta agree with leroy though. Same 5 or 6 people continuously ruining the threads with stupidity.

Just now, Windspeed said:

 

To be fair, he's responding to person's question on Twitter. I'm surprised he didn't begin by explaining what a surface low is...

 

Huh, person must've deleted the question. But that would make sense. I found it humorous/odd to see something so basic coming from that guy.

Excellent piece of ground breaking information in from Phillip Klotzbach regarding Florence this evening. I just wanna say that we are so blessed to have people around that can share this kind of revolutionary insight with us.

(posted as an image as tweet wouldn't embed properly.)

In other news, the HWRF is a huge fan and bombs Isaac to C5 on approach to the Leewards. Not really sure how it does this in the face of 20kts southwesterly shear. Maybe due to super robust convective bursts that help lower the pressure despite shear induced asymmetry? After all, there's 5000 CAPE available in this area averaged sounding--plenty of juice for robust thunderstorms.

17 minutes ago, IWXwx said:

I don't remember ever seeing an EFU.

Those are super common in the high plains. Where there's clearly very strong tornadoes that hit very little or nothing at all. If there's video of it or a visual confirmation, but no damage can be found, a lot of times they'll just go EFU.

2 hours ago, hawkeye_wx said:

This was pretty darn close to my house, 0.7 miles to my nw.  I guess it's a good thing this cell veered north a bit as it approached.

I thought it was interesting that cell was still surface based. I thought for sure it would go elevated, guess not. 

Oh I forgot to mention literally every creek around here is in major floodstage. When I chased yesterday I had to turn around on multiple occasions due to flooded/impassable bridges. Many farm fields have turned to lakes.

1 minute ago, NJwx85 said:

It's partly because the Atlantic has been such a disappointment the last several years, excluding last year of course. 

But mainly it's that a high end TS, low end Hurricane landfall on the gulf coast isn't uncommon. If Gordon had more time over water you would see more interest.

Honestly doubting we see a hurricane out of this. If you look at velocity, there is no inner core wind maxima whatsoever and the storm is still lopsided to the north and east. Maybe even slightly decoupled in this direction as well? I don't think it intensifies much more before landfall.

48 minutes ago, CheeselandSkies said:

Speaking of Iowa, decent amount of sunshine across the 5% area this morning.

Yea today looks quite a bit like yesterday all things considered. Same sort of parameters. Excellent low level moisture, sufficient SRH(provided by the LLJ this time around), abundant 0-3km CAPE and ~2000 SBCAPE. Only concern is storm mode and storm interactions, certainly looks to be messier than yesterday was. I would probably chase, but I'm busy. I'm also finding the amount of 0-3km CAPE an extraordinarily useful parameter with regards to tornadoes, been using it quite a lot this summer. Yesterday had 200 j/kg if I remember and 7/19 had 300-350 j/kg.

1 hour ago, CheeselandSkies said:

Iowa: Home of the 2% or less gorgeous tornadoes and moderate risk/PDS slopfests or cap busts.

The SPC tornado risk issued is actually the chance of no tornadoes at all. 

Speaking of luck on local chases, I had been keeping a wary eye on today since yesterday evening. A boundary would provide sufficient SRH and coupled with low LCLs and quite a bit of 0-3km CAPE, it seemed like an environment capable of squeezing out a few tornadoes, especially if a storm was able to latch on to the boundary. And that is exactly what happened. All CAMs fired 1 or 2 discrete supercells on the boundary, however by 3:30 nothing had taken off and I was getting ready to write it off and go do something else. Just as I said this, a nice updraft developed and persisted, so I bit, and headed out west of Shellsburg. I arrived to a very healthy looking base and had excellent positioning for what was to follow. 

About 15 minutes later, the base started to really wrap up and it became evident that a tornado was imminent. So I called the NWS as the storm was not warned, and ended up staying on the phone with them through the duration of the first tornado relaying them information, as such I have no video(as I use my phone primarily), but I'd like to think feeding the NWS information was more helpful than video. Here's a picture of the multi vortex Shellsburg tornado. It lasted 5-7min.

The storm proceeded to cycle, do nothing and then cycle again. By this time the storm was between Alburnett and Central City and by sheer luck I came out of a painstaking hookslice(do to locals going 20mph in the RFD) and saw the tornado wrap up. It manifest itself as a stout cone and lasted 4-5min. 

The storm now began to have problems with outflow dominance. It cycled again with a brief funnel in the mid levels before the RFD cleared out the base and forced the storm to start from scratch. I decided that I'd back out for some wide angle shots and wasn't disappointed(you can see the new wall cloud and tail cloud starting to take shape.) 

The storm tried one last time to get it done here and then proceeded to go OD for good, where I called the chase. Below is just about the closest the final cycle came to a tornado. Just west of Monticello.

I got back and lol'd when I saw the reactionary SPC tornado watch. I thought the day was pretty straight forward and seemed like a classic conditional 2% type of day, so was surprised when there wasn't any risk at all. I seem to have pretty good luck with these local chase thingies.

PS: @ Hoosier, if these sorts of posts are too long and you want me to condense them I can, but I've found I kinda like writing them, so I do.

Only a matter of time before the social mediarologists start banging the Harvey 2.0 drum. Granted the euro has had a slow moving TC in TX/LA for at least 3 runs now. The 18z GFS now actually develops the wave, leading to increased confidence that at least something forms.

I hate September. If the tropics aren’t super active, it’s 30 days of zzzzzzzzzzzz. Least favorite month easily. 

The total death toll from Hurricane Maria has been upgraded from ~110 to 3,057. This includes deaths outside of Puerto Rico.

https://weather.com/news/news/2018-08-28-puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-death-toll-study

49 minutes ago, qg_omega said:

Outside of the flooding rains on the big island which was well modeled, this was an historic bust

Not particularly, this rapid weakening was well modelled, and while there were hurricane warnings issued(particularly if the storm remained intact longer). The main impact from this storm was never wind nor was the core ever expected to make landfall in the official CPHC forecast. With this being said, the CPHC definitely has some work to do in analyzing intensity.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a tornado or two in IL today either. Cooking OFB stretched more or less along I88, along with a buttload of 0-3km CAPE, low LCLs and adequate mid level flow. Only thing that is questionable is the height rises that are occurring that will probably temper storm intensity and longevity.

Profiles along the OFB arent bad, more than sufficient for a tornado.

5 minutes ago, nycwinter said:

looks like lane might be intensifying again against all odds..

Definitely lopsided to the northeast overall, but the CDO and core of the storm has improved some over the past few hours.

1 minute ago, the ghost of leroy said:

cloud tops are warming a bit on its western side but it still looks great

 

yea I was talking on the order of 4-5 hours ago. Seems that its right about peaking like you said.