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frostfern

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Everything posted by frostfern

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. Warmed from 73 to 77 with this inflow jet. Just bizarre.
  12. Wind is howling and it’s not even raining. It’s a really warm wind too. Very strange.
  13. It’s getting windier here. Some kind of inflow jet behind the system.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. It seems like summers have been trending dryer in the Great Lakes which sucks if you like thunderstorms and don't like droughts.
  18. Do you think it would be worth trying to chase anything over central/eastern Michigan tomorrow? Storms will be moving so fast and the cloud bases will be low. I worry it may not be worth the anxiety, but then I will be disappointed if I miss something good. Scattered wet-microburst type wind damage looks a lot more likely than good supercell structure with tornado potential honestly.
  19. It trends towards a death ridge when the trough finally moves out of the northeast. All the action will be in the northern plains unless an MCS can manage to dive down the east side of the ridge before it eats crap.
  20. I spoke too soon. One run looked more progressive, then it went back to the cutoff solution.
  21. It looks like CAPE increases late overnight into the morning over SW Michigan due to colder air aloft advecting in from the southwest. 1000 j/kg is enough for supercells with such extreme wind fields. I wonder if there will be a tornado watch with this. It's almost like a early spring / late fall severe weather setup.
  22. Next week looks good for thunder according to ECMWF. Showing a progressive zonal flow with heat over the plains.
  23. ECMWF has a good thunderstorm pattern for the western lakes next week now. EML with big CAPE looks pretty likely. It's just a matter of when/where favorable shear/forcing occurs.
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