CheeselandSkies

Can it please stop being mostly overcast and in the 30s/40s?

I don't get how even after a relatively mild winter with our snowpack nuked by the end of the first week of March, proper spring still takes forever to get here.

People wanting to get out and "social distance" in 60s-70s and sunshine are gonna have to wait another 3-4 weeks at the least, and that's not gonna be pretty.

5 hours ago, Baum said:

yup. Although I'd prefer a ring of fire pattern with 65 degree dews and evening grill outs at this point. 

Amen to that.

1 hour ago, Chicago Storm said:

It's a good thing you didn't, as the cold front under-cut just about everything.

Yep. Glad I didn't get suckered again by Lie-owa today (although TBH, if the COVID outbreak weren't happening, there's a good chance I might have since I have tomorrow off).

21 minutes ago, frostfern said:

The destabilization will be driven by cold air advection aloft more than surface heating.  The upper low moving in was producing thundersnow showers over the southwestern US. These will be very low-topped cells.  Less instability is needed.  The bigger problem will be whether there's enough upward forcing to overcome dry air entertainment with such a big shear-to-instability ratio.  I don't think CAMS really know how to handle these kind of small-scale details.  Chasing small fast-moving cells that can poop out at any moment will be frustrating.  It also gets dark early this time of year.  If it's a late-evening event it will be mostly in the dark.

Yep, been there, done that several times over the last several years. No thanks.

16Z HRRR is meh for anything east of I-35 in IA. That's at least a five hour drive for me after working 3AM-noon (actually 12:20, had to stay late today as with every day this week due to COVID social distancing and sanitizing precautions slowing down the workflow, among other things). The expansion of the northern 10% and 5% tornado areas eastward makes no sense to me. Trend of the strongest activity being further west (closer to the MO river than the MS, at least until well after dark) plus the societal lockdown/"avoid discretionary travel" guidelines will have me sitting this one out.

I keep thinking one of these years we have to get a legit early season outbreak involving the upper Midwest again (3/13/90, 4/8/99, 3/12/06, etc) but it hasn't happened yet.

That's-a spicy meat-a-ball!

Legit couplet on the 0047Z scan, but didn't look as impressive again during the actual warning. Appeared to be line-embedded. A supercell now appears to be trying to get going out ahead of that, will pass west of Breckenridge.

Discrete storms look to have been struggling to become sustained all day.

14 minutes ago, frostfern said:

Yea.  There might be an outbreak of low-topped supercell storms coming out of Iowa as the dry slot and upper low sweeps in from the west.  Not a lot of CAPE needed because the tropopause/EL will be low.  It's hard to predict if there will be any really persistent cells though.  Updrafts might have a lot of spin but are usually kind of small and can be snuffed out pretty easily in the dry slot.

Yep, therein lies the rub with this kind of setup.

My interest in this setup has been piqued a tad over the last couple days, I might do some local spotting if something comes up toward WI. Was thinking about going into Iowa; but between the abrupt societal lockdown/economic disruption, disagreement among the CAMs on where the strongest storms will track, likelihood of having to contend with the MS River and the poor chasing terrain nearby, and Iowa's general track record with tornado threats (doesn't produce when you expect it do, does when you don't) I'm leaning against it at this point.

27 minutes ago, Hoosier said:

475 new deaths in Italy, worst day yet and why it is important to not overwhelm the system because some of those people who have died would have otherwise survived.  

To put that in weather-speak, that's more than died in the April 27, 2011 tornado outbreak; or in any Atlantic hurricane since at least 1950 except for Katrina, Maria and (possibly) Dorian.

2 hours ago, Geoboy645 said:

So it's been snowing pretty much all morning here. We have probably an inch or two on the ground now. We were supposed to get a dusting . At least the snow is now transtioning to rain so it should all be gone in a few hours.

My reaction exactly. Did not need it to start looking like winter again with this pandemic misery going on. It'll be gone in tomorrow's 59 with rain; but then it will get even colder than it is now for Friday-Sunday.

I know the winter wonderland is some posters' cuppa; but not mine, at least not before Thanksgiving or after about March 10th.

Finally got an official statement/policy from my apartment building's management on this (what they are doing as far as cleaning common areas, etc).

I'm intrigued (and concerned) that despite the mass flight cancellations/airport chaos; I haven't heard of any action (increased cleaning, spacing out of passengers in cars, service cutbacks/total shutdowns, etc) from the passenger rail systems. Amtrak, Metra, CTA El...maybe I just missed it but I'm in the TV news business so I don't think so, unless something happened after I left work today. Has New York shut down their subway system? Lots of commuter rail systems in the Northeast, too.

Jails and prisons are another thing that popped into my head. Dane County sheriff's department announced restrictions on visitors to the county jails; but what about state and federal prisons? Lots of people crowded close together; access is restricted but if the virus gets in it will wreak havoc.

Does it grind anyone else's gears that the thread for this subject in Off Topic is still titled "Wuhan Coronavirus"? I mean, the whole point of the rather utilitarian official name for the disease was to avoid stigmatizing a particular place and/or people.

5 hours ago, frostfern said:

The Euro shows a zone of 500+ j/kg MUCAPE getting into northern IL and far southern MI Thursday night.  The mid-level lapse rates will be getting steeper and freezing level lowering due to the upper low nosing in, so even less that 500 j/kg could produce some low-topped storms.  The lightning will be in a diminishing trend as the system moves north, but there will probably be a few rumbles everywhere along and south of I-94.  It will be a super tight temperature gradient so Wisconsin might get snow while Illinois gets thunder.

What else is new? Except when Illinois gets early/late season snow while we're dry, lol.

I'm sure smoking doesn't help the prognosis, but let's not use being a nonsmoker as an excuse not to take other precautions.

Just what we need with this COVID-19 misery going on.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but MJO into the IO is favorable for severe weather in the CONUS, is it not?

CPC has had this in their hazards outlook for a few days now. SPC Day 4-8 hints at it in their wording but they're still reluctant to commit to delineating a risk area.

4 hours ago, SchaumburgStormer said:

Like any panic, we have a major disconnect between the facts and the perception.

Facts are, this is a serious disease and we should start taking precautions. They may seem a bit extreme at this point, but we do not have a good handle on what we are dealing with. Err a bit on the side of caution. 99.99% of the public would be much better off by simply WASHING THEIR F'ING HANDS than hoarding toilet paper or any other commodity.

These steps are not being taken to protect healthy young people from the disease. They (myself included) will get it, probably think its a cold or allergies, and will move on. However, the precautions are in place so that I don't pass this to my grandmother, or my immuno-compromised brother, or the person who is mid-way through a chemo treatment, of the little child with an underlying congenital disease. 

I keep hearing "I will be pissed if we cancelled everything and no one even gets sick." This may be the stupidest view I have seen, as THAT IS THE ENTIRE POINT. 

Bottom line, people need to stop panicking. This isn't Ebola or some sort of air transferred AIDS. Instead of buying our local store out of toilet paper, maybe reschedule that birthday party. Maybe postpone that business trip. Stay home from work if you feel ill. Lets be prudent and take some precautions to protect the most vulnerable in our population. It could be your mother, grandmother, sister, or neighbor that may be helped. 

Quite likely the most reasonable post I've seen on this subject on any of the weather forums I'm on. Thank you.

4 hours ago, andyhb said:

Why do you keep tagging me with the weenie emoji?

Because it's a severe event to weenie out over.

1 hour ago, andyhb said:

Definitely a few similarities with the setup that yielded the deadly TN tornadoes on 3/3. Strong westerly flow aloft with similar hodograph structure and I'm going to bet that the NAM/NAM 3 km are too cold at the surface. Any southerly component to the surface wind will yield large 0-1 km SRH when your 850 mb jet is 50 kts out of the WSW.

18Z HRRR sim ref/UH looks ugly for MO bootheel/southern IL/KY tomorrow, but we saw that have a tendency to overhype particularly with some of the OK setups last May. Of course, tomorrow will feature a rather different set of conditions than those did.

Interesting, usually CPC follows SPC's Day 4-8 in that outlook. Rarely seen them introduce a severe area on their own since the Day 4-8 became a thing (or do so beyond 8 days).

Ugly in the sense of favorable for svr wx?

9 hours ago, frostfern said:

Yea.  Tornado outbreaks in March and April are usually going to coincide with abnormal warmth and humidity for the time of year.  That doesn't mean you need summer-like temperatures though.  Shear is far more important, and low cloud bases / high relative humidity is very beneficial because evaporative cooling from nearby precip won't completely stabilize surface-based storm-inflow. 

I think Dr. Leigh Orf's work provided some pretty strong evidence that violent tornadoes ingest a lot of surface-based parcels that are more stable than average, yet still realize some positive buoyancy once lifted into the middle levels of the storm by the upward vacuum-suction force of the rotating meso.  Hot weather brings you the highest surface based CAPE, but that CAPE can be completely neutralized by just a little bit of precip if the boundary layer is characterized by low relative humidity.  The result is many hot-day summer supercells have elevated inflow, and thus never produce tornadoes.  Early spring supercells are very good at producing tornadoes because they often form in an environment where instability is more than adequate for strong convection despite high boundary layer relative humidity.

Good insight, I need to get better about remembering this. Being based further north (like you) I've seen many an early season (even well into May for us) potential setup get quashed by insufficient instability, so I'm a CAPE guy. I get really geeked out to chase on those 86/77 days, then wonder why the updrafts weren't going up like atom bombs. This mindset cost me on 4/9/2015, when I was bumming around IN OGLE COUNTY, IL until about 4:30 PM, then threw in the towel and started for home. Got there just in time to pull up GR Level 3 and see the debris ball about 10 miles from where I'd just been 90 minutes before.

33 minutes ago, nrgjeff said:

...CAMs actually had robust storms, but not necessarily a boundary rider beast. Old fashioned meteorology could have provided a more obvious heads up before the evening news. However, credit some local TV Mets for sounding the alarm on the evening news. Still, it's tough to overcome a 1am long-track cyclical damaging tornado...
 

Good to hear this. Any YouTube uploads of this "pregame" coverage? It seems to me far too often most local TV mets (**coughcough the ones in my local market**) just parrot what the models are spitting out/what the NWS says, are reluctant to do their own mesoscale forecasting; go out on a limb and either downplay an event that everybody else is hyping (would have served them well in most of the snow events this past winter) or sound the alarm about what had seemed like a low-key situation (like overnight Monday-Tuesday). It's high reward, get it right and you look like a genius and earn major credibility for your station over the competition, but also high risk if you get it wrong.