frostfern

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.

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.