This road trip seems like it might be popular. Ithaca is downwind of the fires burning along the US-Canadian border, near Lake Superior. This trip will run through the middle of the country and lasting two days. Total mileage will cover 1143 miles, at a pace of about 67.7mph. Our shorter day will be the first, and will conclude after 541.6 miles. We will start on Tuesday, because, well, it is early Monday morning back in the Continental US.
DAY ONE (Tuesday)
Ithaca, New York
By the time we get moving, a fairly decent area of low pressure will move into the Great Lakes. Eventually, this will help firefighters out, but in the immediate term, rain tends to bring particulates lower to the surface. IT will be especially smokey until it gets rainy. The rain should really set in between Erie and Cleveland, with the most intense thunderstorms somewhere near Columbus. It should conclude fairly quickly after that, but don’t be surprised if there is still rain in Englewood, northeast of Dayton.
DAY TWO (Wednesday) Our route will be clear of that system, though there may be a bit more smoke in western Ohio into Indiana, before flow becomes southerly. This should be a mostly pleasant afternoon of driving, however the next wave will have an active warm front, which will be lifting into northwest Missouri as we arrive. The last hour or so of our trip is liable to be wet.
Kansas City has definitely been in the news lately, what with the World Cup playing several matches at Arrowhead Stadium. That’s but a couple hundred miles down river from St. Joseph! As life gets back to normal for western Missouri, what does the weather hold?
At 153AM, CT, St. Joseph was reporting a temperature of 76 with clear skies. Dew points were in the mid 70s as well, remnants of a humid day that may lead to some fog in valleys as dawn approaches. The prevailing flow is not only a ridge, but one that skirts the Canadian border, allowing the warm and moist air of the Gulf to continue wafting into the center of the country. There is a bit of a perturbation gently moving along the northern Great Lakes. There is a weak boundary toughing some storms off in southern Minnesota. The southward propogation of this system is expected to be slow, but eventually reach Missouri by mid-Sunday, but which point the airmass will be fully ready to pop. Some isolated pre-boundary air mass storms are possible in the afternoon on Sunday, with the cold front moving through the afternoon, brining only a modest change. Tomorrow (Today?) – Mostly sunny, High 92, Low 73 Sunday – Increasing humidity, chance of isolated showers and storms. Breezy, High 95, Low 74
TWS: Tomorrow – Partly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 92, Low 73 Sunday – Mostly sunny skies. Hot. High 92, Low 73
AW: Tomorrow – Humid with plenty of sunshine High 91, Low 73 Sunday – Mostly sunny and humid High 92, Low 72
NWS: Tomorrow – A slight chance of showers between 2pm and 4pm, then a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms after 4pm. Sunny, High 93, Low 74 Sunday – Sunny, High 93, Low 73
WB: Tomorrow – Sunny. High 88, Low 77 Sunday – Sunny High 89, Low 74
WN: Tomorrow – Partly cloudy with showers and isolated storms, High 93, Low 74 Sunday – Mostly cloudy, High 93, Low 73
CLI: Tomorrow – Light rain showers High 92, Low 73 Sunday – Light rain showers High 92, Low 72
Apologies for the weird timing of this post. On vacation and I have adjusted to the time zone and the rest of the group has not. St. Joseph is fortunate, in that they can avoid the smoke from the Minnesota/Canada border.
With the ongoing heat across much of the country, it seems almost cruel to revisit our forecast for last month in Bremerton. Wet weather was rotating through, with low pressure that became hung up in the Canadian Rockies. The rain was done by Sunday, the 28th, but temperatures along the Puget Sound were unable to clamber out of the 60s. How refreshing! Temperatures were all fairly even, but the Weather Service and Weathernation were square there, and with the precipitation forecast to earn a forecast tie. Actuals: June 27th, .03″ of rain, High 65, Low 50 June 28th, High 65, Low 48
10:01PM Happy Saturday! I think a lot of people label August as the dog days of summer, but it is pretty similar right now. Hot, humid, not much of a break for a lot of the country. This was a good time of year, when I was still in operational meteorology, to do some training or read. There is some down time.
We are taking a long day’s drive through the East Coast, covering 665 miles over 5 states and a district. Despite being solidly along the coast, the route will be fairly forgiving, cutting through Raleigh, Richmond, DC and then… Harrisburg? There is enough urban driving, and then the drive into the Poconos to account for, so our speed will only be about 62.5mph on average. Still, 5 states in a day? Not bad.
Jacksonville, North Carolina
It’s just that time of year. A low in the Gulf Stream is tailing a boundary into the Carolinas. It’s enough that there is widespread shower activity in the Appalachians tonight, and it’s liable to be a foggy morning as far north as DC. There will likely be showers embedded within the low clouds throughout Virginia as we make our way northward as well. I’ve been in Virginia only a couple of times, and it has rained every time. Is that a thing? Crossing the Potomac, and then heading north into Pennsylvania will be a bit nicer of a time. We will arrive in the Finger Lakes with mostly cloudy skies and a muggy atmosphere. The next boundary will be sliding out of Canada, making sure we don’t have TOO much fun in Ithaca.
Minneapolis is presently just outside of the heat dome that has cooked so much of the southeastern US. The heat hadn’t really even started to build back on the 24th and 25th of June, when we put together a forecast for the home metropolitan area of Victoria-Weather, and temperatures didn’t get out of the 70s. It led to some misty mornings, but the rain had already shipped out of town, and we saw a rare low in the 50s on the 25th. Brr? As you may have suspected, Victoria-Weather was the top outlet, and ended up winning the forecast. Actuals: June 24th, High: 78, Low 61 June 25th: High 72, Low 51
10:21PM: It’s extremely warm in the southeast, and there is a ring of fire, with thunderstorms in the Plains and the Great Lakes, but right now, the world’s eyes are on Vancouver, where Switzerland is playing Algeria in the World Cup. It’s currently 57 degrees in Vancouver. Perfect soccer weather, if they were outdoors. Instead, fans can enjoy a chill when they step out.
As we sit on the final day of June, awaiting the beginning of July, the pattern has certainly taken a turn for summer. The spring season is marked by strong cyclones and supercells that bring tornadoes to the southern Plains and Dixie Alley. It rightfully gets a lot of attention for the destruction and disruption it can bring.
Spring storms are brought by the changing airmasses, from cool and dry winter to hot and humid summer. Eventually, summer takes hold and it just gets incredibly hot and humid in the South. There are a few afternoon thunderstorms, essentially every day, but they are fueled directly off of one air mass, and not a clash. That’s where we are now, it’s overwhelmingly hot, especially in the southeast.
This is also the time of year where fuel for thunderstorms is the greatest, so whenever flow is from the west, and we get low pressure in the lee of the Rockies, we can get strong to severe thunderstorms in the Plains. This isn’t necessarily colder air, just drier air, but this burst of energy can ripple through the atmosphere, and the weakest of boundaries offer as firing lines for thunderstorms to ride along.
Tonight’s outlook shows exactly what a typical summer time severe set up should look like. There is the origin of the storms in western Kansas, where they may get a bit twisty, with tornadoes more likely. From Nebraska to Minnesota, one of those ripples in the air mass will act as a guide for a batch of storms with howling straight line winds – a true derecho. It’s almost midnight, and it is producing nearly 80mph winds in central Nebraska.
Often times, there are embedded tornadoes within squalls like this, but really, a tornado warning might just be what it takes to pay attention to a storm that will mess things up pretty well on its own.
Given the copious amounts of fuel on hot humid days, long track derechos are more likely. Even if they are derechos, lines of thunderstorms occur more frequently than the cellular storms of spring. Even in New York a line of storms is moving through upstate New York, feasting on the atmospheric moisture, rather than conflicting airmasses.
Storms like our Nebraska storm, above are also called mesoscale convective complexes. Our air mass storms in the southeast erupt when surface heating reaches a point that causes the moist air to become buoyant, rising, condensing and forming cumulonimbus clouds and eventually, thunderstorms. Those are the same mechanics for our storm in the Plains to initiate, but there is a different mechanism for its sustenance.
As I hope you have learned by now, warm or moist air rises. Typically, this is the surface warming up, but overnight, especially with the elevated thunderstorms we are seeing, cooling from the top down after nightfall is what draws those parcels of air upward. They continue to track along whatever phantom boundary, or wave or ripple exists, and they tend to roll on until that boundary tapers away.
Our Nebraska storms show no signs of dying out quite yet. Look for a loud wake up in Sioux City Iowa and Rochester, Minnesota.
