frostfern

Black hole for here.

What do you know. The next system is another boring backdoor cold front. Trough-east ridge-west + boring and dry NW flow might be a lock for the whole goddamn summer.

No organized rain producer anywhere in the long range. Anything that does fall is scattered airmass t-storms late in the period i.e some places could have zero rain due to hit-miss pattern.

40 degree low-to-high spread under high pressure ( very little airmass change ) is impressive for this area. Frosty mornings followed by high temps in the 70s is more typical of high desert climates.

East wind must be annoying over there. Crazy high-vs-low spread happening in rural areas here today and tomorrow. Morning frost to mid-70s. Lack of smoke definitely helping.

Climate change.

It's almost a corbon copy of May 2021 with the heat in the west, blocked up jet, and dryness over the Midwest. Really hope June finally turns around like that year.

I just read the AB fires are so bad the bogs are literally burning. Apparently lowland boreal forest in northern Alberta has a lot of thick peat mats. Without a soaking rain that stuff could take months to fully burn. Looks like the smoke is not going away any time soon.

A little on the cool side, but seeing real blue sky again is nice. The rain yesterday mostly skipped over me though.

The problem is you speak like corn is the reason tornado alley is centered is centered on the plains and MS valley and not New England. I’m not working due to chrinic illness but I have a meteorology / atmos-sci degree. I know the Rock Mountains play a bigger role than you think. I mean, Oklahoma has so much more f*ing corn compared to Indiana in April. Also why are you even talking about summer convection climatology and in the same breath discrediting a perceived decrease in *SPRING* thunderstorms in recent years in Michigan. The two are different topics. Summer 2021 was more stormy than average here.

I experienced really bad smoke in Colorado in 2021. It was all from California fires, but somehow a cold front stalled out against the Front Range caused it to mix down and bank up against the mountains. It was so thick there were no shadows even with no clouds present. The smoke was so strong it made me cough. Its not quite that bad now here, but still the worst I’ve ever experienced in Michigan from a distant smoke source. It seems like the ignition fuel for these fires is mostly dormant brush and grass (though the flames obviously do spread to lowland forest canopies wherever they get hot enough). Its not the normal conifer-fueled mountain fires you get from late summer into fall. This is something different.

Sorry didn’t get pictures. Its cloudy as well as smokey now. Its mixing down. Smells like a campfire.

Would really like to see actual blue sky instead of this wretched smoke. It's thicker than most CS debris days.

Entire second half of April and first half of May without a single rumble of thunder sucks though. I'm not pining for severe, but general thunder used to be a thing in the spring here.

Trough-east ridge-west as far as the eye can see kills me. Its not as bad as a cutoff stalled directly overhead, but still boring AF.

I was talking about garden variety t-storm suppression. t-storm season runs from April to October. Instability decreases as you move from SW to NE across the Great Lakes all those months. It doesn't just suppress severe weather, it suppresses garden variety storms too. Chinook Winds != Elevated Mixed Layer. Completely different things. Elevated mixed layers and low level jets are huge weather phenomenon that cover multiple states at a time. They are not confined to the Western Plains. Low pressure systems forming on the lee side of the Rocky Mountains pull gulf moisture in from the south and southeast and steep mid-level lapse rates in from the west and southwest. These favorable features translate east along with the parent system, but they become less pronounced with time due to a number of factors --- convective overturning (when cap breaks), airmass shearing out horizontally, and moisture mixing out vertically. Therefore the favorable "loaded gun" temperature/humidity profile is more pronounced the closer you are to the GOM (source region for tropical moisture) and also higher terrain to the west (source region for the elevated mixed layer). The favorable parameter space diminishes gradually as you move away from the source region. Corn plays a role in boosting the instability for major derechos in the corn belt, but the climatology would be similar even if there was no corn. Corn transpires a lot, but its not the only thing that transpires in the summer. Forests and wetlands add moisture as well.

You responded as if you were correcting something I said, when I didn't say anything different. We agree. The fact that you responded as if you disagreed made it look like you misunderstood me. I don't think Michigan t-storm frequency being climatologically lower than Illinois or southern Wisconsin can be explained by corn evapotranspiration. It's not just a "from-late-June-on" problem. It's present in April and May as well as much later in the summer when southern Lower Michigan also has mature corn. Actually, the Rocky Mountains play a huge role that you are completely ignoring. The low level jet that forms over the plains and transports moisture north during the spring and summer is a climatological feature, not completely unlike the Gulf Stream over the western Atlantic. The analogy isn't 100% because ocean dynamics are quite different, but they are both examples of a boundary current caused by flow from the west being blocked (though only partially blocked in the atmospheric case). Steep mid-level lapse rates above 700 mb also contribute massively to instability over the eastern US. The elevated mixed layer that causes steep mid-level lapse rates has origins over the Western US or northern Mexico. Higher terrain causes it. Regions to the south and west of Michigan have access to this unstable mid-level airmass first as well. In the end I don't think crops play as much of a role in decreasing instability as upstream convection using up the energy and overturning the airmass before it reaches Michigan. Generally, the farther south and west you go the greater instability there is climatologically, and it's almost 100% due to proximity to being closer to both the GOM and Rocky Mountains. Yes, but the pattern has been less frequent lately over Michigan, especially in the spring. Also, you are using a pretty narrow definition. True training events are rare, but stationary E-W boundaries are not so rare. Even if you do not get a classic training event, a stalled E-W boundary usually provides multiple opportunities for convection, sometimes over a period of several days. These patterns just don't happen here with the frequency they used to. The most prominent recent example I can think of occurred in late August into early September in 2018. That kind of setup used to happen in May and June more years than not, but now it seems like it hardly ever occurs in the spring or early summer.

There actually have been some significant straight line wind events on this side of the state the last few years. There have been long periods with little garden variety or general thunder. Things get brown every summer by July. I remember garden variety storms and nocturnal heavy rain events being more common in the 90s and 00s.

I hate how this forum doesn’t have a good quote breakup ability on phone, but you didn’t understand what I said. Most training events are not rooted at the surface, so it isn’t Lake Michigan thats stopping them. The real problem is cold fronts suck at producing good precip here because the narrow band of return-flow instability gets eaten up by convection to the west. Michigan never gets gulf moisture first. It has nothing to do with corn. What is the pattern for training nocturnal storms in Michigan? Its usually a stalled E-W baroclinic zone with strong 850mb moisture flux from the SW. For some reason that pattern hasn’t been happening as frequently.

The lake doesn't have much of an effect at night as far as training storms go. There's just climatologically more instability the more west you go because the gulf moisture goes up the plains and then curves east. MCS gets ahead of the CAPE pool by the time it gets to the Great Lakes. That combined with a bad synoptic pattern with a ridge to the west and a trough to the east = suppression.

Seems almost every summer there are long stretches where all the thunder stays west of Michigan. The stronger storms make it to the Michigan side of Lake Michigan, but a lot of garden variety MCS arrive late at night in their final death throws, then the next day is like 30% chance of a popup before the cold front comes through at 2pm.

Fresh snow melts a lot faster than old snow, and it looked like most of the old snow was already melted before the last storm.

No good thunder in the long range. What is it with these backdoor trough / ridge-stuck-west patterns. Happens every spring just as the sun angle gets high enough to actually destabilize things in a good pattern.

Michigan climo.

I'll take some to keep things lush. At least it's in the upper 50s as opposed to the upper 30s.