frostfern

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.

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.

The downward trend in Michigan is over :(.

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.

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.

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

Up here in Michigan May 2018 kinda crap. Stuck on the north side of the warm front with constant rain for the first half of the month. Only south of I-80 saw the sun. Overnight lows were mild enough for things to start growing, but it didn't really get nice until the end, and at that point it was summer. Summer started early, but there was no pleasant spring with sunshine and temps in the 70s. Went straight from rain and 50s early to 80s and 90s late. Not that I wouldn't take 80s and humidity over cloudy and 40s and 50s.

What is "mild" anyways? I had one of the worst fevers in my life back in early March, but since I was only bedridden for 3 days and never felt so bad I might die if I don't go to the hospital I couldn't get tested. For COVID-19 it wasn't that bad, but I'm having a lot of trouble believing it was something else because I'm 40 and haven't had influenza since childhood. The symptoms were either influenza or a short COVID-19 case. A positive antibody test would make me feel better. It's still worth it even if false positives are possible. Whatever it was my wife got it exactly a week after me. Both my parents were exposed to us before I realized it might not have been influenza, so I was nervous for a while. My father has heart disease.

I noticed the snowpack in the zone southeast of James Bay has continued to increase over the past month. That might have something to do with this stubborn Eastern US trough pattern. The spring melt has failed to reach the 50th parallel anywhere east of Winnipeg. Zone between 45 and 50 has lost some snowpack, but it's stopped as of now and won't resume for several days. We really need a good torch to knock back the glaciers of Ontario and Quebec. Lengthening days and higher sun angle does no good when it all gets reflected off snow. The Canadian prairies now being snow free and warm only seems to amplify the annoying NW flow and eastern Great Lakes digging.

Every month has been some variation of March or November for the past 5 months.

Even if there isn't a snowstorm, these cold outbreaks in April can be interesting due to the increasing afternoon instability. Heaviest snow showers's I've ever seen in my life in Michigan have always been on April afternoons. They tend to be wet and mix with a lot of graupel though, so not much accumulation.

ECMWF had it one run then lost it. Now GFS is showing it.

GFS is now showing a Great Lakes snowstorm on the 14th. Maybe Grand Rapids MI finally gets the bulls-eye 8" swath after we missed it every time this winter. Now that the buds are just starting to open it's finally time for some snow. lol

The destabilization will be driven by cold air advection aloft more than surface heating. The upper low moving in was producing thundersnow showers over the southwestern US. These will be very low-topped cells. Less instability is needed. The bigger problem will be whether there's enough upward forcing to overcome dry air entertainment with such a big shear-to-instability ratio. I don't think CAMS really know how to handle these kind of small-scale details. Chasing small fast-moving cells that can poop out at any moment will be frustrating. It also gets dark early this time of year. If it's a late-evening event it will be mostly in the dark.