Archives
Categories
WeatherGuys Links
Monthly Archives: July 2024
Are thunderstorm rain amounts hard to predict?
Meteorologists would generally agree that summer is the most challenging time of year for making accurate rain forecasts.
During summer, there generally is enough moisture and atmospheric instability to help fuel the development of rain showers. Scattered thunderstorms are one of the most difficult weather events to forecast. Continue reading
Category: Meteorology, Severe Weather
Comments Off on Are thunderstorm rain amounts hard to predict?
Comments Off on Are thunderstorm rain amounts hard to predict?
How does our late spring/early summer precipitation stack up historically?
If you think the first half of the summer has been unusually wet, it is not merely your impression — it is a measured fact. Between May 1 and July 15, Madison received 21.85 inches of precipitation, punctuated by the … Continue reading
What happens to the wintertime cold pool in summertime?
We have commented a number of times in the past few years about the areal extent of the hemispheric cold pool of air at 850 millibars (about a mile above the surface) during the winter. As one might expect, that pool expands dramatically from October through February and then begins to contract as we move toward spring and summer.
Our analysis uses the minus 5 Celsius isotherm (line of constant temperature) and has shown that the average winter cold pool area has systematically shrunk for at least the past 76 years. One might reasonably wonder if this cold pool survives at all during the height of Northern Hemisphere summer. As it turns out, some summers have a number of days in mid-July on which there is absolutely no air at 850 mb that is as cold as minus 5 Celsius. Roughly half of the last 76 years have had such a “vanishing” cold pool, with the pool getting very close to vanishing many of the other years. Continue reading
Was Hurricane Beryl a special storm?
All hurricanes are special, given the extensive damage they can cause when they make landfall. Beryl was considered extra special because it was a record-breaking storm.
Beryl rapidly intensified from a tropical storm to a major hurricane (Category 3 or higher) with wind speeds that increased to 95 mph in less than two days. Category 3 storms have sustained winds between 111 mph and 129 mph. Only six other Atlantic Basin storms have intensified this quickly and those storms all happened after August, the typical time of year with conditions favorable for hurricanes. Continue reading
What is a heat dome?
“Heat dome” is a term used by the news media to explain extreme heat conditions across large geographic regions.
The American Meteorological Society maintains a glossary of meteorological terms and added the term “heat dome” and this definition in March 2022: “An exceptionally hot air mass that develops when high pressure aloft prevents warm air below from rising, thus trapping the warm air as if it were in a dome.” Continue reading
