frostfern

1 hour ago, Kitchener poster said:

There is a T-storm to the SE of London that is almost stationary. A few unincorporated towns are probably getting quite the rainfall totals. 

Lake breeze convergence.

6 hours ago, A-L-E-K said:

it's almost like lawns are bad

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.

14 hours ago, Kitchener poster said:

Unirrigated lawns are toast. Recent transplants are already seeing leaf drop. 

No above average chances of rain until next Tuesday. 

Sniffed this persistent dry down awhile ago. 

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.

1 hour ago, RyanDe680 said:

Decent pullback in the chances for storms this coming weekend.  

Environment looks meh.  Saturday looks like best bet

There is no EML.

On 6/10/2020 at 1:34 PM, Hoosier said:

Remember when the heat was supposed to help?  

There are all kinds of variables at work of course.  I have read that dry heat may spread it better than a humid airmass.

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.

10 minutes ago, Maxim said:

The cold/trough talk is pure lol. Still running at a +4 departure for the month despite the recent cooldown.

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.

1 hour ago, Hoosier said:

We are gradually descending toward La Nina.  Nino to Nina transitions have generally had warmer than average summers, especially in the past 30-40 years.  I wouldn't guarantee it but I'd definitely lean that way.

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 hours ago, CheeselandSkies said:

Not amplified in the right places though if you like spring for storms.

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.

24 minutes ago, NTXYankee said:

lol eventually a line of storms won’t split or die when it moves into Columbus only to fill back in to the east.

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.

4 hours ago, RogueWaves said:

Thunder's been pretty minimal with these cells tho. Not to be a buzzkill. Certainly worthy of the severe warnings but winds/hail are the bigger story it seems.

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.  

1 hour ago, Solidsting said:

yeah last night the cams went off. even had PDS TOR in my area i was very suprised. but i figured they would favor a more linear mode anyways just knowing how the weather up here is

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.

8 minutes ago, WestMichigan said:

93° air temp and 74° DP here.  It is definitely a hot and muggy day.

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.

1 hour ago, madwx said:

 

That's definitely not the case in the western lakes.  Summers have been markedly wetter.  Even in the eastern lakes precip trends seems fairly flat.  

 

MSN summer rainfall trends above for reference

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.

19 minutes ago, Kitchener poster said:

As a plant pathologist who knows that there is an intimate relationship with fungal disease and weather - this summer is shaping to be a punt. 

It seems like summers have been trending dryer in the Great Lakes which sucks if you like thunderstorms and don't like droughts.  

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.

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.

4 hours ago, hawkeye_wx said:

The Euro is now showing a very boring pattern as an upper low cuts off and parks over the eastern lakes.  Today/tomorrow may be the only rain for the next ten days.

I spoke too soon.  One run looked more progressive, then it went back to the cutoff solution.  

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.

4 hours ago, CheeselandSkies said:

Yeah, after flirting with it in 2006, '09 and (IMO) 2018, I think 1988 has officially been dethroned as the worst season in the history of the practice (I was 2 at the time so I don't remember it personally). Ironically, our chief meteorologist said today that year was also the last time the center of a remnant tropical cyclone tracked into Wisconsin (Hurricane Gilbert, although that was at a more seasonable time of year for such an event-September).

I was hoping for some good storms to take my mind off the COVID pandemic, but instead I think the pandemic and more recently the Floyd fallout have taken my mind off the lack of storms.

Next week looks good for thunder according to ECMWF.  Showing a progressive zonal flow with heat over the plains.

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.