frostfern

I drove all the to South Haven waterfront to capture some footage. Glad I went. It was awesome. Marine-layer shelf was so low it was almost touching the water. Nice lightning bolts too. The portion that hit was near the kink in the line with the stronger bowing segment / rear-inflow-jet slamming the shore just a few miles south. Winds were still impressive, though not quite as severe as down towards Benton Harbor. The worst wind seemed to hit directly between Benton Harbor and South Haven, but it would have been hard to find a public location to park the car with a beach view.

MUCAPE is rising into the 2000s even with clouds though. There's a good moisture tongue coming in from Iowa.

The sad thing is some places in the world have managed to keep numbers low without hanging a threat of destitution on millions. The barrier to management in the US is ideological.

Destabilization will have to be entirely by advection.

You better believe lots of people will place blame and not have a lot of sympathy for the selfish.

Could also load up on Lysol. Take a long ass needle and inject it into the lungs as a preventive measure.

If people were willing to fight a virus like they fight a war against an invading army things would be different. Worship of individualism and capitalism is the undoing of the US. Nice for the people who can afford to stock shit and hide in bunkers. People who've been living paycheck to paycheck will come for your ass regardless.

Maybe if the moisture tongue over Iowa gets up here there will be good elevated after-dark boomers. It's just really hard to see anything surfaced based getting this far north now. Unless the 925 mb - 850 mb winds really crank behind the current crapvection complex.

Looks like a stratiform rain event up here. Clouds everywhere. Typical. Don't know what SPC was thinking putting the enhanced risk up here yesterday. Wouldn't be bothered if the long range wasn't so dry and uneventful. Rub it in and give me a weenie.

The downward trend in Michigan is over :(.

I'll take non-severe if it has good lighting. I just don't want EVERYTHING to miss way to the south. Need the rain. I hate these E-W oriented setups where one row of counties gets trained while others get crap.

I'm wondering if the convection won't be surface based up here in Michigan. It will be a warm day, but rather dry. The higher dewpoints come in from the west over the lake late in the day.

Illinois clipper-in-reverse-mode.

Hope this will be a good show.

For western zones maybe. It's hard to say how long it takes for the ridge to build east with the new east coast cutoff clogging things up. Backdoor easterly flow knocking down the ridge looks possible at times. Looks like a warm dry pattern, but intense heat confined to the plains for a while. I just hope Friday night delivers some rain here because after that things get real dry.

It's all relative, but in mid-summer generally the farther west you go the better. This looks like a repeat of 2018, warm but blocky with no ring-of-fire setup until late August. Probably something to do with arctic warming. Stratiform tropical system will be the only drought buster for the lake shadow.

After Friday it's back to the boring blocky pattern.

It became a big MCV / QLCS while crossing Lake Michigan. Wisconsin always gets the peak severe, but sometimes the late night leftovers here in Michigan are still good. Most times the Wisconsin evening MCS just dies completely, then afternoon stuff pops way to the east the next day. Annoying aspect of summer climatology here. The severe stuff often survives through west Michigan though. It's just when there aren't severe setups with good shear and/or low-level-jet the lake shadow dominates.

I remember the MCV coming through around 2 AM on the 22nd being incredible in terms of constant lightning bolts.

June 21-22 2010 was wild. I don't think I'll ever experience that again.

Usually mature multicell clusters and concave-type structures produce good CG barrages. Bow echo's are often tilted back towards the stratiform region so a lot of the CGs land on the back side under the rain. It's often hard to find a lot of CGs out in front of a bow. QLCS type storm will produce lots of CGs in rain-free zone where there is a concave kink or curve to the line. The convex/bowing segments don't tend to have a lot of CGs out front. They tend to be on the back side instead. Having a big anvil also seems to play a role too. Very new/isolated storms that haven't produced much of an anvil yet can be kind of lightning-sparce even when they have intense updrafts (even hail and such). I mean, they often do have a lot of lighting but it's usually predominately IC and not noticeable during the day.

I've seen a lot more IC activity compared to CGs. I think the big MCS with a large anvil and stratiform region produce more frequent CGs. Afternoon pop-up stuff doesn't always perform in terms of photogenic CGs, and that's what it's been this year. I think low cloud bases and heavy warm-process precip can be a problem for lightning photography. You often can't see the lighting until the storm is practically over you, then it's hard to photograph. If you don't get a strong MCS that produces lots of bolts-from-the-blue ahead of the rain shafts, the window for getting lighting is really brief. It's so much easier to film big bolts out west where you have high bases and much less precip. The Arizona monsoon can be amazing.

West Michigan seems to miss out on most general afternoon thunder. Hopefully Friday will feature a more organized MCS. Will really need the rain by then. Who knows if it will be evenly distributed though. So often it's a 40 mile wide E-W ribbon of 2-3" with almost nothing north or south.

At least Chicago doesn't get lake shadowed. This weak diurnal stuff always skips over my area. Storms make it 2/3 the way over the lake then die.

Hope the lake shadow pattern breaks at some point. It's annoying seeing thunder everywhere except the lee of Lake Michigan. Typical late June pattern.