Thursday, February 15, 2007
Looking Upstream & Potential Severe Weather
The 500mb hemispherical view is a great place to start a forecast. There’s a lot of bang for the buck. So much information can be deduced from the one single map. With that being said, our long wave pattern is quite active! Right now we’re seeing between six and seven long waves circulating the northern hemisphere. This generally translates to a weather system passing through every three to four days.
The blue dashed lines are troughs of low pressure. There are more on the map but we’ll focus on three labeled Sat., Tues., and next Sat.
Just rounding the bend of the ridge out west is a wave that looks to move in for Saturday. At this point it looks to clip us, passing by just to our north, but still, this will give us a shot of some mixed precipitation, with the best chances across northern counties. We then get under the ridge which is presently out to our west. The most notable changes at this point will be that we start to warm and ultimately get some Gulf moisture to move in too.
Take note of the trough labeled Tues. Long range models have this digging quite far to our south and spinning up a surface low which will impact our weather as early as Monday evening. At this point a bit more moisture looks to make it in by Tuesday and this set up looks to have the three ingredients we need for thunderstorms; moisture, instability and lift. Our main focus in the extended forecast is with this system, though at this point the greatest severe threat appears like it will develop just to our south and east where there will be a bit more jet support.
Now the trough labeled next Sat., may in fact bring in our first bout of severe weather. Granted this is still some eight day out; nevertheless, long range models have this developing a sharp trough off the west coast by next Friday and the surface low that spins up has been proged as low as 989mb. This system looks to have great support along with low level jet in excess of 50 kts. This may be one of those storms that will have it all; severe weather to the south and a hefty batch of snow to the north and west.
This too bears watching.
If present trends continue, we may be looking at a busy spring!
The blue dashed lines are troughs of low pressure. There are more on the map but we’ll focus on three labeled Sat., Tues., and next Sat.
Just rounding the bend of the ridge out west is a wave that looks to move in for Saturday. At this point it looks to clip us, passing by just to our north, but still, this will give us a shot of some mixed precipitation, with the best chances across northern counties. We then get under the ridge which is presently out to our west. The most notable changes at this point will be that we start to warm and ultimately get some Gulf moisture to move in too.
Take note of the trough labeled Tues. Long range models have this digging quite far to our south and spinning up a surface low which will impact our weather as early as Monday evening. At this point a bit more moisture looks to make it in by Tuesday and this set up looks to have the three ingredients we need for thunderstorms; moisture, instability and lift. Our main focus in the extended forecast is with this system, though at this point the greatest severe threat appears like it will develop just to our south and east where there will be a bit more jet support.
Now the trough labeled next Sat., may in fact bring in our first bout of severe weather. Granted this is still some eight day out; nevertheless, long range models have this developing a sharp trough off the west coast by next Friday and the surface low that spins up has been proged as low as 989mb. This system looks to have great support along with low level jet in excess of 50 kts. This may be one of those storms that will have it all; severe weather to the south and a hefty batch of snow to the north and west.
This too bears watching.
If present trends continue, we may be looking at a busy spring!
Posted by Ted Zarras at 7:13 PM
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