Weather Blog

Rare is the occasion that it is after 8pm, CT, there is an enhanced risk for severe weather and it hasn’t popped yet. There is a mesoscale discussion in anticipation of a looming watch in central Oklahoma and North Central Texas, and the HRRR still has storms popping around Weatherford…. soon.

This is the opening salvo of a multi day outbreak, which is also the first significant storm of meteorological spring. It’s not a surprise. Tomorrow has been flagged as a potential severe weather day since last week. If there is a surprise, it is that the SPC hasn’t upped the outlook to moderate yet. The storm still looks strong, but not any stronger than it looked days ago.

Storms tonight will feature strong winds and a threat for tornados (hence the pending tornado watch), all a part of a broken line of storms, with a stronger threat for larger tornadoes in the Lower Mississippi Valley tomorrow, including isolated supercells. This will be the most significant of the severe weather in terms of intensity and geographic coverage, but more rough weather is likely in the Coastal Plains from the Mid Atlantic to Georgia on Wednesday.

Tonight, Oklahoma City and Dallas may be early morning recipients of the strong weather, while tomorrow, we will look at Shreveport, Jackson and Mobile and surrounding locales. Again, the headliner is tornadoes, but straight line squalls will be a factor as well.

This is all brought on by a deep, well defined and fast moving trough, a hallmark of Spring. Another hallmark of these big spring storms is that there will be snow on the back end of the feature. Ample moisture and energy will lead 4-8″ in many locations from Iowa to Michigan, including a dumping on the Upper Peninsula.

This will be a dangerous weather pattern for the middle of the country, with the first severe outbreak testing readiness, as well as probably bringing out storm chasers, making things a bit dicey on the roads. This will be the first rodeo with the slimmed down Weather Service as well, which makes weather minds tense more than normal. As I noted, this storm has been anticipated for days. The first forecasts for it may have come from meteorologists no longer employed. We won’t get this kind of preparation time often.

Oh, I’ve been working on this post long enough, look what happened:

Stay safe this week

It is a sad day across the meteorology community. I know there are political undertones to everything, but particularly with the story today that hundreds of National Weather Service employees were laid off today and rumors are that there will be more to follow. I don’t believe it is controversial to say my heart aches for the mostly young men and women who had their dream jobs, and are now unemployed.

The American government is the single largest employer of meteorologists, and all of your favorite weather people have a personal connection with the Service one way or another. The compassion we feel is personal.

A lot has been made of how impersonal and cruel the cuts have been, which naturally makes it hurt more, knowing that friends and respected cohorts were so callously discarded. This has been a tough time for all federal employees and those that love them and appreciate them. The loss of meteorologists at the NWS cuts deeper for all of us, though.

We’ll notice next week as a major severe weather outbreak hits the southeast. We will again notice for subsequent storms this summer. We’ll notice during hurricane season. Private weather companies in America are built on the back of NWS data and systems. All of us will suffer under an understaffed Weather Service.

Other nations don’t have a similar bureau, but other nations don’t have the same kind of virulent, dangerous weather in all forms. In America, the federal Weather Service is a form of public safety that is irreplaceable. Forecast models come from the NWS, unless they come from abroad. Constant worldwide coordination seems like a challenge moving forward, staffing or not.

In a world where a high premium is placed on prediction, we are in uncertain times. Weather forecasting was changed forever today, and not for the better.

You don’t need me to tell you that it has been an awfully chilly week. Is this spurred by a rough Valentine’s Day weekend? Probably not, but I can say that as we get away from that holiday, temperatures are rebounding in a fairly significant way.

After successive rounds of low pressure rotated through the US east of the Rockies, high pressure is building in, and it is going to try to stick for a little while. The upper level pattern isn’t terribly conducive to warm weather, but the time of year and amount of sunlight we are seeing, as well as a west wind off the Rockies, with a little bit of southerly flow through the Mississippi Valley is going to do a lot of the heavy lifting. It’s already started.

The above image from the WPC shows how much warmer it is already for parts of the Plains and lower great Lakes as compared to yesterday. And it will continue to get warmer further east today and into the weekend.

With high pressure in place, the jet is going to split over the weekend, with a ridge developing in a northerly jet, and a trough continuing to remain in place over the south central US. This will allow the warm up to remain in place, even as rain starts to move in to some of the Plains and western Gulf states. Then, it’s March.

We aren’t expecting any significantly abnormal temperatures in either direction to begin the month, but a normal day in March feels a heck of a lot better than a below normal day in February.