Jns2183

My dad had one hit his neighborhood. He has no power or Internet and he hears the chainsaw going. Right up means about 1,200 ft there and that looks like about 100 knots g2g at peak Sent from my SM-S731U using Tapatalk

I think this year we see some action. In May. Although with these temperatures that may get pushed to April. Sent from my SM-S731U using Tapatalk

I just want to get it as cold as possible going into this monstrosity. Our Average high the past 25 years this week is 65 degrees which appears to be our low temperature this week Sent from my SM-S731U using Tapatalk

I have everyone complaining how cold I have the house this morning but I call it prepping for this week. The ac goes on the minute the sun breaks out today. I currently have ambient temperature at 61 degrees inside Sent from my SM-S731U using Tapatalk

That seems like a road perfect for experiencing a NDE storm chasing Sent from my SM-S731U using Tapatalk

If you're in the mood the nerdout, I’ve been drifting into the "ghost math" of how we actually capture the sky. It turns out our rain gauges are essentially professional liars, especially when the wind is busy whisking our snow away or the radar beams are overshooting the action entirely. I’ve pulled together a little guide on the invisible physics behind it all, from the way a breeze "deflects" a snowflake right past the collector to why our local airport totals might be missing a good 15% of the real story. It’s dive into fluid dynamics and PA weather quirks, perfect for anyone who wants to see the logic that turns raw data into the actual ground truth. https://jns182wx.github.io/Gauge_Bias_Correction/ I have a couple of calculators for anyone to try figure out their own biases Sent from my SM-S731U using Tapatalk

To the wisdom filled folks here who have any remembrance of the famous northeast 5+ year drought what do you remember. Reading up on it in context of the 1960's was a wild ride. It appears states were preparing to come to blows with other states, like drawing up national guard plans, to secure their water due to some ridiculous poor planning. The Delaware river was site to a full on war against the salinity encroachment not threatened to make all drinking water in se pa undrinkable. Throwing the crazy politics and daily bombings and it seems like a wild ride. Sent from my SM-S731U using Tapatalk

.03" to go with my .48" sunday Lancaster county is doing a whole better than Franklin and especially Adams this week. Adams has fallen off a cliff Sent from my SM-S731U using Tapatalk

Those stations I posted about from PEMN have soil moisture and temperature at 3 depths Plant Available Water. 10\text{cm}: Moisture for your Lawn. (Currently in a deficit/drying phase). 20\text{cm}: Moisture for your Shrubs and Garden. (Currently stable, near baseline). 50\text{cm}: Moisture for your Trees. (Currently very healthy and high). Watch moisture after it rains and during dry spells. They signal everything The rain past Sunday never even with dent on the deeper sensors. The upper sensor we already are below where we were on Sunday. Sent from my SM-S731U using Tapatalk

If people are not aware I wanted to let them know about the PEMN Network Penn state's putting a lot of places that are rural. We're talking about many thousands of dollar professional stations that put out excellent one minute data that can be seen in real time. If you go to the Pennsylvania climate website and look for PEMN viewer Sent from my SM-S731U using Tapatalk

I was at Hershey Park for 7 hours Saturday. This weather would have been much preferable. Mid 80's and the sun beating in those lines was not enjoyable. At least I didn't go Friday and have to deal with that giant fight. Sent from my SM-S731U using Tapatalk

My Magnus Opus of why I can never be mad at preceiptitation reports after a big storms.. We've all been there. NEXRAD shows 0.50" for your pixel. Your CoCoRaHS gauge reads 0.22". Your neighbor two blocks over posts 0.81". Both of you are right. The radar might also be right. Here's why, and why it gets genuinely alarming during intense convection. The Geometry First I'm 73.8 miles from KCCX at State College. At that range, the 1° beam has expanded to 6,803 feet in diameter — that's 1.29 miles across. The center of that beam is floating 7,882 feet above my roof. The super-resolution pixel covering my house is 0.830 square miles / 2.15 km². The legacy pixel was 1.660 square miles / 4.30 km². That single dBZ value stamped on that pixel represents the average backscatter of a volume of air roughly the size of 12 Disneylands hovering a mile and a half above the ground. Now imagine 100 top-of-the-line rain gauges evenly distributed across that pixel. Super-res spacing works out to one gauge every 481 feet. I stand dead-center in my grid cell. By Pythagoras, my four nearest gauges are at the corners — each 340 feet away from me. Here's Where It Gets Uncomfortable For well-behaved stratiform rain — your warm-frontal overrunning, your classic nimbostratus — everything is fine. CV of 0.10 to 0.16. My four nearest gauges within a few hundredths of each other. Radar is defensible. Life is good. But bump up into Category 7 — intense convective core directly over the pixel — and the math falls apart spectacularly. Radar reports 0.50". CV = 1.00. Standard deviation = 0.50". Lognormal distribution gives a pixel-wide range of 0.090" to 1.391" at the P5/P95 level. That's a 15:1 spread across my 0.830 square mile pixel, between gauges that are less than half a mile from each other. But here's the part that genuinely made me sit back: my four nearest gauges — 340 feet away from me, about the length of a city block — have a realistic P10/P90 spread of 0.250" to 0.810". Three-to-one variation between gauges I can practically see from my porch. Both are physically correct measurements of the same event. Scale that up to Category 8 — extreme/flash flood/training cells — and it becomes almost philosophical. Radar reports 0.50". Pixel range P5/P95: 0.052" to 1.613". That's a 31:1 ratio. My four nearest gauges: 0.157" to 0.965". Six-to-one. The gauge 340 feet north of me reads under two tenths. The gauge 340 feet east reads close to an inch. The radar says half an inch. Every single instrument is functioning perfectly. At 1.00" reported by the radar the numbers get worse: Cat 7 gives my nearest four a spread of 0.500" to 1.620" and Cat 8 gives 0.314" to 1.930". The gauge closest to me physically could read less than a third of an inch while the one a city block away reads nearly two inches. During the same event. At the same time. Why This Matters for Verification Work This isn't a measurement error problem. This isn't instrument quality. This is the fundamental physics of convective precipitation at sub-kilometer scales, documented by Peleg et al. (2013) with a dense gauge network and confirmed repeatedly in the literature. Rainfall within a single radar pixel during convection can vary by over 100% — and that finding came from a network covering a smaller area than my NEXRAD pixel at 73.8 miles. When someone posts their CoCoRaHS total and it's half what radar showed during a summer storm, the correct response isn't "your gauge is off." The correct response is "yes, that is entirely expected and physically consistent with everything we know about convective precipitation structure." The radar isn't wrong. Your gauge isn't wrong. The atmosphere just doesn't care about our need for tidy single-number summaries. The only honest statement you can make about precipitation during a Cat 7/8 event with a single gauge is: this is what fell at this exact point. Full stop. Extrapolating to even the next block over is an act of faith, not measurement. Methodology: Lognormal distribution fit to literature CV values by precip type (Ciach & Krajewski 1999, 2006; Peleg et al. 2013; Jensen & Pedersen 2005). Local near-gauge CV compressed by exponential spatial correlation model. KCCX beam geometry calculated using 4/3 Earth radius refraction. All pixel areas computed from actual Camp Hill–KCCX range of 73.8 miles. Sent from my SM-S731U using Tapatalk

A Few Things That Should Make You Uncomfortable At 100 ft — 62,351 ft³. Roughly the size of a large house. This is the only range where the radar is sampling anything resembling a point. At 1 mile — 92 ft beam diameter, still smaller than a football field. Still reasonable. Still vaguely honest. At 10 miles — beam is now 922 ft wide. Bigger than the range gate itself. The pancake starts to make sense. At 65 miles (Camp Hill) — ~22 billion ft³. The beam diameter (~5,990 ft) is now wider than it is deep by a factor of 7. Your "data point" is a disc, not a cube. And it's floating at ~5,200 ft AGL. At 100 miles — 54.9 billion ft³, beam nearly 1.75 miles wide, center beam at 9,708 ft AGL. At this point the radar is essentially sampling the lower stratosphere and calling it precipitation data. Depth is always 822 feet. It took me a number of ever increasing pancake sizes and a traffic cone of unsavory origins to visualize this. This pulse and about 50;more with 97% overlap get run through a bunch of algorithms and out pops a pixel over us. So if radar makes you want to pull your hair out, this is why. America’s Boeing Everett Factory, 25 miles north of Seattle, remains the world’s largest building by volume and world’s largest factory. Workers assemble Boeing aircraft—including the new 787 Dreamliner—within this 472,000,000-cubic-foot factory. My single radar pixel contains roughly 47 Boeing Everett Factories worth of air Sent from my SM-S731U using Tapatalk

The atmosphere is a terrible heater and a spectacular refrigerator, and it's been this way for 4.5 billion years with zero apologies. Seriously, haha, what happens when air heats up. It rises and cools. One state requires energy in, another requires nothing Sent from my SM-S731U using Tapatalk

Here's the addition to drop into the message board post, after the site link and before the feedback section: --- **Lowest Radar Beam by County — South-Central PA Reference** For those who want to know what's actually looking at their county, here are the lowest 0.5° beam heights for the counties covered by this study, sorted alphabetically. Listed as best radar and beam height, with the runner-up in parentheses: **Adams** — KLWX: 4,680 ft MSL (KCCX: 9,241 ft) **Berks** — KDIX: 7,642 ft MSL (KCCX: 10,418 ft) **Cumberland** — KCCX: 7,235 ft MSL (KLWX: 7,377 ft) **Dauphin** — KCCX: 8,029 ft MSL (KLWX: 10,267 ft) **Franklin** — KLWX: 4,902 ft MSL (KCCX: 7,605 ft) **Lancaster** — KDIX: 9,420 ft MSL (KDOX: 8,523 ft) **Lebanon** — KCCX: 10,155 ft MSL (KDIX: 10,763 ft) **Perry** — KCCX: 5,498 ft MSL (KLWX: 8,789 ft) **Schuylkill** — KDIX: 10,008 ft MSL (KCCX: 10,418 ft) **York** — KLWX: 5,874 ft MSL (KDOX: 9,530 ft) A few things worth noting on these numbers. First, these are county-wide averages computed from five representative coordinate points distributed across each county they represent the typical beam height across the bulk of the county's land area, not any specific location within it. This matters especially in south-central PA where the terrain is anything but uniform and several counties are genuinely split between radar coverage zones. Adams, Cumberland, and Lancaster in particular have portions of their land area where a different radar may actually be lower than the county average suggests in some cases up to three different radar sites each hold the lowest beam advantage over some piece of a single county depending on which direction you're standing in it. Second, and this trips people up: these heights are above mean sea level, not above your head. To get the actual distance between you and the beam you need to subtract your own elevation. If you're at 500 feet in the Cumberland Valley and the KCCX 0.5° beam shows 7,235 ft MSL over Cumberland County, the beam is roughly 6,735 feet above you — not 7,235. In the ridge-and-valley terrain to the north and west where elevations run 1,200 to 1,600 feet, that same beam is considerably closer to the surface than the MSL number implies. It's the AGL figure that tells you whether the beam is actually seeing your weather. Sent from my SM-S731U using Tapatalk