frostfern

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.

Lake breeze convergence.

Keeping it green and short is pointless where I live. Everywhere is sand. Wild grass is very high from all the rain in May, but of course mowed grass is already going dormant.

It's weird seeing the current massive early torch go way up into Quebec where there was still 2+ feet of snow on the ground just two months ago. There's gonna be a boreal forest fire outbreak at some point if the warmth and drying continues.

There is no EML.

I wonder how much time spent in re-circulating AC air contributes to spread. I the north people open their windows and get fresh air. Arizona and Texas mid-summer is the other cabin fever season. Similar for Florida with the humidity if you're not right on the beach where you might be able to catch a breeze.

In modern times a cutoff trough doesn't necessarily mean colder than average, but it usually means boring with no good ring-of-fire pattern ever setting up. Just seems like a lot of the good t-storm season has been wasted with blocky patterns this year. Last year was decent in May, July, and then again September, but I remember 2018 being boring for almost the entire summer... until late August. 2018 was warm but had a lot of cutoffs/blocks and was quite boring.

Seems like even most of the warm summers lately have been weird "warm with a SE trough"... i.e. slow block-y pattern with hardly any good storms outside the upper plains. Need some kind of broad westerly component in the 800-500 mb level to get the elevated mixed layer moving east into the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley. These meandering patterns with frequent cutoffs are always boring, whether they are warmer or cooler than average.

Less amplified is better for storms. This blocking nonsense is boring as hell. You'd think it would be over it by now since most of the latter half of May was a stupid SE-CONUS block. Nope. It's back already, and will only be broken down by yet another troughing pattern. I thought this summer was supposed to be warm. Wrong.

Splits seem to happen because the outflow gets too far out ahead of the storm. Today I got some good time-lapse of a big whale-mouth shelf. It was so dark I thought for sure I was going to get clobbered, but when the shelf actually passed over the line was a bit broken with a lot of dry gaps between small cells. I think the shear was directed too much along the line, rather than perpendicular. I noticed the section that pivoted to the northeast (due to earlier MCV development) was more severe than the east-facing section. Orientation of the line relative to the shear seems to make a huge difference with the strength of linear segments. Supercells can do well with any outflow boundary orientation, so long as they aren't too crowded. Linear segments crap out and split pretty easy when the orientation is wrong.

Most high-shear events produce a lot of IC lighting with the discrete cells. During the day you hardly notice the lighting. The bigger linear segments often have tons of CGs, but they can be hard to see in the rain. I really love storms that produce the big clear-air bolts out in front of the rain shaft, but they can be kinda rare. You almost have to live in a place like Florida that gets the daily sea-breeze convergence storms to see CG shows consistently.

It seems like the backed winds aloft were a problem most places. Only a hard right-mover could really begin to rotate, and it never really happened. There were lots of brief little couplets embedded in the convection, but they never really lasted long. In Michigan, good discrete supercell structure with tornado potential only really seems to happen with a warm front in the area or in response to some kind of outflow boundary / lake-breeze interaction. With such a strong low level winds and strongly mixed environment there wasn't much in the way of boundaries for storms to latch onto. They just moved with the flow, more north than east, which wasn't really ideal. I know it's happened in the past, but it just seems really hard to get the proper type of hodograph for widespread supercells in Michigan. Probably a good thing.

Does anyone have footage from the Walker area around noon? My wife said it was frightening. The building was shaking and things were flying through the air. I was expecting most of the severe action to miss GRR to the southeast, but there was an early MCV feature that developed from pre-dawn convection over northern Illinois / southern Lake Michigan. It gave some of the early convection that rolled in off Lake Michigan a real strong punch and also took it way farther north and west than I expected.

Warmed from 73 to 77 with this inflow jet. Just bizarre.

Wind is howling and it’s not even raining. It’s a really warm wind too. Very strange.

It’s getting windier here. Some kind of inflow jet behind the system.

It's weird that the cells over southern Lake Michigan don't have any lightning despite 1500-2000 j/kg MUCAPE according to SPC meso-analysis. Cells near Purt Huran / Sarnia have a lot of lighting, with less MUCAPE (800 j/kg at best). Maybe mid-level lapse rate is more important than CAPE for lighting.

The transition from dry heat to wet heat was really sudden. It was already pretty hot around noon, but the dewpoint wasn't even 60 yet. Now it's pushing 70 and rising.

Wisconsin has certainly been getting wetter. Big change once you get east of Lake Michigan. Maybe I should qualify and say the lake shadow effect has been getting worse. I'd like to see a graph of Michigan for July and August. MSN is already wetter by climatology.