frostfern

Ridge is delayed a few days now. Tuesday cold front looks stronger and wetter maybe. I think when the ridge finally builds it will have soupy humidity with it... so nasty heat index values. Mid-to-upper 70s dewpoints and low 90s looks more likely than triple digit heat.

I finally did good. Parts north and west still didn’t get anything though. Waiting for the rain to the west. Hopefully it at least gives the lakeshore counties a good soaking. Hope it still has convection late. MCSs typically become stratiform by morning with such weak shear. There’s a good low pressure with it so maybe it will hold together despite skinny CAPE and weak shear.

Slowest moving MCS ever over Lake Michigan. The lake doesn’t need anymore water. Such a tease.

There was lots of thunder here, but it was almost all soft rumbles from the middle part of the cloud. It don’t know what it takes to create a lot of CGs. I kept watching the rain shafts for big strikes but they never came. Just flashes and soft peals.

Well it finally rained good IMBY. 0.8” at least with a string of training cells. Still pretty hit and miss though. Hope the bigger MCS to the west makes it here too.

Nice isolated storm inland from Ludington. I cloud see the tower blossoming up through the haze from here. I thought it was much closer. It seems like storms can pop up closer to the lake there because there's significant hills. Southern Lake Michigan is surrounded by flat so it's hard for anything to pop up.

I think there will be SE diving ridge-rider MCS activity at some point. The problem with this stagnant pattern is the showers don't move very fast. They pop up in one location and rain themselves out, so instead of a 0.25" spread over a general area you get an inch falling over an area of a a few square miles and nothing nearby. I notice a lot of little mesoscale micro-climates with a pattern like this here in Michigan due to slight terrain differences. Storms like to pop up near Jackson and Ann Arbor because there's a slight ridge there. There also some pretty high terrain west of Cadillac in the northern lower peninsula that's been getting showers almost every day. Low areas and areas too close to bodies of water miss most of the time.

Good. Maybe there will be a chance of ridge-riding complexes turning right / driving SE into the heat. I'm so tired of this hot dry pattern with the jet up in Canada and organized convection confined to the northern border.

Funny how it didn't even rain enough to get the pavement completely wet here, yet 3 miles away it rains an inch in an hour. Pin-prick-sized stationary lake-breeze shower lasted 40 minutes. Surprised there was no thunder. There's a lot of moisture in the air, but it only comes out in one small random location. Lots of places are very very brown.

Yea. We got some of those in late May this year. When there was easterly flow during the blocking pattern there just wasn't enough moisture for anything to pop up. No easterly, but today winds were virtually calm and a pulse shower (no thunder) due to the lake breeze dropped an inch of rain at the airport. I'm only 3 miles away and there wasn't enough to completely wet the pavement. It just sprinkled a few huge drops of rain. With dewpoint near or above 70 showers that form are super efficient precip-generators. The problem is they form in one random place and don't move.

Yea. The rex-block really dried out the eastern great lakes. The block has finally broken down, but the jet is still too far north to propel any Wisconsin MCS into the Great Lakes. Light westerlies with little shear and no nocturnal low-level jet is a dry pattern for me.

I never said that. Just that the pattern sucks and it's getting dry here too, especially north of I-96 and east of 131 where the June 26 MCS didn't give much rain. It's frustrating seeing Wisconsin hog all the rain and thunder with this airmass popup pattern. It's not as dry as the eastern side of the state yet, but that's mainly just the fact that there was quite a bit of rain June 9 - 11. Since then it's been getting dryer and dryer here too.

Okay, but i's not the greatest year here either though. It's not full drought yet, but still boring as hell if you want t-storms. 2018 repeat. Have to wait until late August to get one of those good low-level jet-fueled nocturnal MCSs. On the east side of the state you at least have a shot at some afternoon storms. Here Wisconsin afternoon stuff inevitably eats shit when it hits the lake, and night stuff dies too with no low-level jet due to constant weak-ass synoptic pattern. I remember when heat waves used to have nocturnal convection. Recent times they have nothing but airmass shit that gets totally suppressed by lake-breezes.

Western Michigan is being lake shadowed to hell though. I can see it getting extremely dry if we don't get a single damn thunderstorm. These constant weak synoptic conditions with light west wind don't give any rain on this side of the lake.

The lake breeze clears out dust and pollen but increases invisible ozone. If you're sensitive to ozone the lake makes it worse. It tends to have less pollen and dust though if that's what bothers you. It's kind of a choose your poison thing. It's not as clean as an ocean sea-breeze because the smaller volume of the inversion-trapped marine air can collect more and more pollution over time. Stagnant high pressure is causing high ozone levels near the lakes. There's some trapped fireworks smoke around as well.