Showers / Storms Remain West

We’ve got a frontal boundary still poised just to our west and this again will be the focal point for showers and storms. Overnight, a complex of storms raced from north east Iowa to the southwest. This has now pushed into north central OK. The feature was very reminiscent of phenomena that are called “ridge-runners”. These complexes circle an area of high pressure, feeding off of a moisture channel.

Moisture convergence to our west that stretches well north of the map above provided the necessary fuel to sustain a batch of showers and storms overnight. This is on the edge of a High to our north west under a ridge. Of particular interest though was the path of motion of the complex. With the Low parked to our north east and the high to our north west, as Drew depicted in the previous blog entry, our winds aloft are predominantly out of the north. Complexes will follow the moisture and the mean motion of the mid to upper level wind field, which in the case of our present set-up is north northeasterly, making the complex move to the south southwest. Typically we see movement more to the south southeast.

Posted by Ted Zarras at 10:15 AM