Stormfly

1 hour ago, Snowchaser said:

Thunder snow watch 

Yes!  Thundersnow at night is the best!

Too soon?

Nice day for a climb!

7 minutes ago, Paleocene said:

Don't want to spam the thread with pics but holy smokes the CMC buries i-95 corridor

Too bad the chance of it coming to fruition is probably about the same as winning a $30k progressive jackpot!

EDIT:  Ice is only good for doing donuts in the lane with the Arctic Cat.  Otherwise, it's a real mess especially if bad enough for the balsams to start losing big limbs!

35/35 (100% RH) and SUPER FOGGY mist here.  Rolled in just after 0300 according to cams and cars were quite frosty then.  Little if anything showing up in Belair.  The IR illuminators make it look worse than it really is but the visibility is low.  I'm willing to bet the 445nm looks like a death ray...

Very light here but flaking nonetheless.

Mounting practices particularly with wind.  I guess the more inputs the better for any forecast but we do need accurate data!  Ultrasonic sensors are far more sensitive than inertia based sensors as well.  But this AI they're using isn't much different than so called computational photography in mobile phones which attempts to compensate for the physical limitations of tiny sensors and lenses.

Yes I have one, just got in hand on the 5th.  I  have been experimenting with various heights above ground level and comparing to reference (Vaisala) instruments.

It has its pros and cons and the amount of stations that are online is quite impressive.  However, with data collection one must consider all the variables in various locations and the skill/training of the owner.   I suppose with the sheer number of stations the bad eggs can be sorted out.  The price point is attractive and the mount/appearance is appealing to most novices, etc.

44 minutes ago, nj2va said:

It’s December 5. There will be other chances especially at Deep Creek or Canaan that are closer than CT or Poconos. Or even better, we get a region wide storm that means you don’t need to chase. 

Everyone is still in shock from the snow drought of 19-20.  I still remember having the windows open on Dec 25 2015 while the Christmas turkey was in the oven.  Then not even a month later we're buried here.  But it's definitely time for more than a car topper!  I haven't plowed or had to use the blower in too long.  I wouldn't even mind having a rainy day with 6" on the ground and a sharp freeze turning the pasture in a huge ice rink!  Drifting four wheelers is fun!

Wasted cold and the familiar saying "imagine if this was snow" during day long downpours gets old.  Maybe I need to move to upstate NY.

5 hours ago, DTWXRISK said:

 Idiot comment 

LOL I hope I am wrong, but as the saying goes trend is your friend.

51 minutes ago, nj2va said:

Dare I say 12/19/20? 

More rain?

December is toast for us.

Unless you like making mud pies.

37 minutes ago, DCTeacherman said:

Welp, back here for another winter of tracking.  I believe this is my 14th winter tracking storms on the internet.  This year I'll need more distraction than usual because my wife died back in August and now I'm a single parent of two small kids (2 and 4) .  Hopefully mother nature can throw me a bone.  

Sorry to hear this.  Hopefully something good can come along wx wise to wrap up 2020 which has just been bloody awful for many.

1 hour ago, RDM said:

Wow.  Going anywhere ivo of a faulty 7.2kV feeder in the rain is brave.  Seen first hand what a faulty feeder on a 2.5MW generator can do and it ain't pretty.  

I don't go near any primaries until I get the all clear or physically see/lock open disconnects!

One thing with trees I don't mess around with any tree that's within 10' of any power line.

I remember being in Belair when this happened!  33kV line dropped across 13kV line plus failure of OCRs at substation in Churchville.  Fortunately those homes were unoccupied.  This could have been quite bad with injuries/fatalities!
 

1 hour ago, WinterWxLuvr said:

GFS ...

This made me LOL as on the eve of Isaias we did a genny transfer switch test and there was a fault on a 7.2kV feeder under the parking lot and pretty pink flames shot up from the ground setting the grass on fire.  It was thundering too.  Ran out with a CO2 extinguisher and put out the grass once the OCR tripped.  This (pic) is pretty much what I saw...

Definitely a trace, noticed the top of the grill was white in security cams.

Ditto for cars.  More of a "superpretzel salt" looking graupel, but frozen is frozen.  Legit car topper for sure here.  Still flurrying.

First flakes now in Jarrettsville!

I was in Abingdon right before that warning spun up and it was hard to see anything, Laurel Bush Road was getting like Bush River at times.  Reminiscent of driving through a summertime gully washer.  A couple of flashes and thunder too!  Impressive for the last day of November!

1.49" here, 2.55" just east of me.  Like a summer day of horse shoes out there.

RE: BE SURE TO KEEP YOUR LIVE TREE WATERED!

This is self explanatory!

1 hour ago, H2O said:

We had one house near us do some sort of flashing, blinking Xmas display with every color imaginable and no thought to how the lights were arranged. It was like looking at an EDM concert 

It's like music, they feel louder is better.  So they start off on the twinkle kick.  And things go downhill fast from there.  Big reason is LEDs have very fast attack and decay times, meaning they go from dark to full on back to dark in an instant.  Incandescent bulbs have a natural buffer in place as the mass of their filament has to suddenly rise in temperature and cool off.  A good LED driver mimics this so the twinkling is not so harsh.

I have an abnormal sensitivity to flicker/brightness change so 60Hz electromagnetically ballasted fluorescent lamps give me a headache within minutes.  Ditto for those old CRT displays that refreshed at 60Hz.  Even the LCDs that use PWM dimming bother my eyes.  The cheap LED Christmas lights are terrible.  If I look at them for a few seconds and change view or close my eyes I can still see them like an afterimage.  Drives me nuts!  Some car tail lights are like that too and the PWM frequency is just too damn low.  Have no idea why they do this.  I suppose using a faster 100kHz driver which costs perhaps a dollar or two extra is too much.

I do like the new LED streetlights they are installing.  Much better control of light and the faster they get rid of the horribly yellow HPS lamps the better!  Even this far away from (Baltimore) some nights the orange glow to the SW especially in winter is annoying AF!

And why do car dealerships have to leave their lots lit up like a professional ball field all night long?  They are (mostly) using LED now.  They can dim them way down and have local motion sensors brighten them if someone walks on the lot.  Not only saves energy (a lot actually) but gives neighbors a break.  When it's foggy or snowing the amount of scattered light is ridiculous.

12 hours ago, WxWatcher007 said:

How often do you actually see this?

 Quite a bit in the old days when homes had one outlet per room, two if you were lucky!  Adding insult to injury these were pre "Merry Midget" days too where C7 bulbs were used indoors.  They got quite toasty particularly the blue bulbs and were the source of ignition on dried out (real) trees.  Speaking of, a dried out tree is a fatal fire hazard.  In homes where the primary escape is through the living room and the bedroom windows are either too high or just not possible to easily escape from.  Death trap set up there.  A 7' tree will be releasing over a megawatt of energy within a minute of ignition temperature.  This kind of energy release raised the temperature of the enclosed space hundreds of degrees in mere seconds.  Surrounding materials reach autoignition temperature before a smoke alarm is activated.  Self extinguishing polymers release toxic fumes making the air which is far too hot for lung ingress already toxic.  I think you get the idea.

Thank goodness times have changed.  LED bulbs have essentially no heat and fake trees are self extinguishing and (for the most part) electrically non conductive.

LEDs tend to have better color too BUT cheap ones that just use half wave rectification (single diode) flicker horribly and don't have high efficacy LED elements so they are dim.  Get a good set (where the white ones actually look like incandescent lamps, not the cold blue look!) and use a switching mode power supply like a laptop uses to produce clean DC and they'll last long and look nice.  Especially outside displays.  Nothing like driving in the country where someone has strung their fence with 60Hz strobing LEDs that practically induce a seizure when passing by!

Interesting, I'm east of you and the power going off around the same time but just for a few seconds certainly isn't a local recloser incident.  Nor were there any weather (wind mainly) elements conducive to faults in distribution or subtransmission equipment.  No flashes (outside of lightning) were recorded by surveillance and photoamplification sensors (for meteors) which do in fact show positive when overhead faults occur within line of sight.  Always interesting on windy nights.

22 hours ago, mappy said:

Visible/audible, noticed the flash outside when the power outage woke us up. 

That's amazing, you must be closer to our backyard then thought!

Same exact obs here.  We managed 0.22 in here.  One flash of lightning here.  Power went out a few times briefly and the final time it went out for approx 10 seconds.  About a min later there was a fairly bright flash.  I was awake because of alarms from the power failure.

I scrubbed video and found it.

Maybe we'll have thundersnow this winter.  If we can't have big totals, squalls with thundersnow go a long way for memorable events.  Lost geese really tack on the points!

The warmth was nice, today the rest of the decorations go up and I like it to be a bit cooler.  Waiting for it to cool down too as it's much easier (for me anyways) to do tree work on the property.  Can't stand bucking logs when it's 80F out and sweating like a pig in full PPE.  I don't know how the utility guys do it.  I guess being 30 years younger then me helps.  But I refuse to be the guy on the porch in the rocking chair yelling at the cars hissing down the road!

Pretty meh here, TBH the strong southerly breezes were more enjoyable today.  Endless leafnados!  Probably picked up a few bushels of big oak and maple leaves in the barn all by itself from having the slider open which faces due south. 

Funny this time of the year we get yellow boxes with no lightning.  There were a few flashes but those weren't from lightning.  (the mother nature kind!) ;-)

November 2020 Derecho! ;-)