Short Range Models spell good news for Minneapolis/St. Paul

The Twin Cities have been very fortunate in that they have avoided severe weather for the bulk of the year. Today, much of eastern Minnesota finds itself (along with Western Wisconsin) in the slight risk area for severe storms. It’s been there for 5 days now. Now, however, the short range models have thunderstorms emerging in northern Minnesota and not popping up south of St. Cloud until after 9, when the boundary is almost out of the Twin Cities.

It’s far too early to make any proclamations, but if the short range models are correct, the Twin Cities will continue their dry, incident free summer tonight.

Watch out for flash flooding in the central Appalachians

There is a stretch of of the US, generally from the Chesapeake southeast through the central Appalachians, which remains under a slight risk for today. That area will shift only a bit to the southeast tomorrow, and will bring some steady rain along the way. Already, parts of Maryland are being monitored for flash flooding.

The mid-Atlantic has seen a little bit of rough weather of late, and it’s mounting. Heavy downpours are a bit more apt to cause flooding, and that appears to be the situation tonight.

A positive August trend

I’m going to be verifying the forecast for Orlando later today, and while I know that the weather today is similar to what it was when we issued the forecast earlier this week, there is another similarity that is ongoing. It’s the middle of August, but we aren’t looking at any imminent tropical features in the North Atlantic.

With the forecast for hurricanes continuing to be above average, this could certainly change on a dime. The hurricane driven winds that exacerbated the wildfires in Maui, are a reminder that the North Atlantic is not the only place threatened by tropical storms.

Stormy days ahead

It’s been since the spring, but the SPC has actually started using the Days 4-8 outlook imagery, at least days 4-5, with a mass of potential storms moving through the Ohio Valley to the mid-Atlantic. For now, it is something of a curiosity, but with this much certainty this far out, it seems fairly likely that the outlooks will be upgraded as we get closest to Sunday and Monday.

Norwegian nonsense

Norway is a very important country in the history of meteorological research. Vilhelm Bjerknes formed the Bergen School of meteorology, which produced meteorologists like his son Jakob and Carl Rossby, as well as the Norwegian Cyclone model, which is one of the first basic understandings of how low pressure systems work, with warm and cold fronts, which reach occlusion and deteriorate. For all that meteorological history and prowess, the country is sure upside down today.

Via Accuweather

I highlighted a few places, namely the two warm spots and the coolest spot. Tromso and Bodo are both north of the Arctic Circle. Drammen is in the southern part of Norway, southwest of Oslo. (Bergen, the city of meteorological record, is also chilly and in the southern part of the country.) The cities are the same distance apart as New York and Orlando, so this is particularly unusual. When you look at the radar and see most of the North Sea socked in with rain, it starts to make more sense, and when you realize the Arctic is still seeing full daylight for 20 hours a day, it all clicks.