frostfern

Wow. I picked 1.45 IMBY but it was spread over hours. As much as I’d prefer a thunderstorm to boring stratiform rain, I feel long duration light rainfall helps more with greening. Still need way more water here, but the short duration 2+ inch per hour instantaneous-rate showers seem to run off to the street without truly soaking into the soil. It’s especially bad when you have a layer of clay on a slope.

Get ready for the smoke! Can’t even enjoy my low dewpoint days anymore. Ready for fall man.

I’m so happy to finally get a good soaking, but I don’t think I’ve seen a short term forecast this bad in a long time. It’s like one of those anecdotes meteorologist haters will bring up (only they pretend the forecast is wrong all the time because they simply refuse to remember the 95% of times the forecast was right). I can only imagine the hair pulling here if this was a winter storm.

Lot of similar days here with towers going up almost directly overhead but not dropping their load until they move a few miles off to the south or east. Whats stranger is how the NWS didn’t predict this stratiform defo-band. Crazy how they still weren’t mentioning it in their last discussion. Maybe it was supposed to be over I-94 instead, but you’d think they’d be looking at the radar.

Rain.

Winners aren’t sharing.

Dark cloud base of 40k footer overhead, but only scattered big drops making it to the ground.

Lake breeze / outflow pops teasing me yet again. At least this one is tall enough to make some rumbles, so it could spread.

All I’ve gotten is a lot of 5-10 minute lake breeze showers and one weak MCS that just barely brushed me with the better rains splitting north and south. It’s added up to barely over an inch for the month of July. Not nearly enough in this warm weather. It’s crazy dry.

All this humidity in the air, but it’s impossible to squeeze out any meaningful precip.

zzzz…. bleak. Very Republican precip pattern. Rich get richer, poor get poorer. Forever.

At least it isn’t a Herculean feat to even get a thunderstorm where you live. It’s like nighttime complexes no longer exist here in West Michigan when they used to be like 80% of our summer precip. This year in particular the main EW frontal zone is either over the Upper Peninsula, or it’s down in Illinois/ Indiana. The transition is a single day, and of course storms fail to fire over Lake Michigan and only get going once the front has passed to the southeast. We also never get those 40 kt low level jets aimed at Michigan these days. They pump moisture at Minnesota, Northern Wisconsin, and even the UP for days, but fizzle to nothing whenever the boundary sinks south into my area.

Okay. I didn’t know what you meant by weakness. In some cases it’s an area where evapo-transpiration is higher due to recent rain. It’s the same feedback that fuels rain over the Amazon, but over here it’s agriculture, not rainforest.

It seems you’re just in stagnant large-scale pattern favorable for afternoon airmass thunderstorms. As for a particular local storm, it can be lake breezes, higher terrain, or urban heat island. Nothing to do with glaciers or anything mysterious.

Small low topped CB just wondering around the SW side of town teasing. Again not tall enough for thunder. It seems like the updraft has to reach the tropopause before it can get beefy enough to spread rain on more then 1 square mile at a time.

GRR radar undergoing maintenance, spuds pop up. Coincidence?

I cannot remember a lake shadow as bad as this summer in my life. Storms used to happen at night unaffected by the lake. It used to rain at night. Now all convection is diurnal and completely dictated by local geography.

Cell tops are only 20k. These are small warm showers so far. The cells by Lansing broke the inversion and are around 40k.

Well, a few specks of 40 dbz aloft. Come on man!

Looks like a micro-cell trying to push up just north of Holland. Hope the next scan is over 50 dbz. So far showers are struggling with some kind of mid-level inversion or something.

Definitely some towers around. Storms may erupt overhead any moment, but too late for the lakeshore north of Saugatuck.

Tired of anvil sprinkles. I think afternoon is poor timing. After 8pm storms are not so suppressed by the lake. Afternoon meso-high is what suppresses everything.

Showers over the lake are struggling to get going yet again. Chicago + south lake line misses south and blocks the moisture.

I’m afraid I get the gap again. What a summer.

It was pretty impressive for GRR to hit 90 before noon. Dry soil feedback / dewpoints mixing down to around 70 boosted the heat. In ideal conditions that would be a setup for upper 90s. Increasing clouds and strengthening wind off the lake is putting a lid on this afternoon though.