Weather Blog

Thanksgiving is on Thursday, which means for many of us, the next 5 days or so are going to be jam packed with travel to and from our family’s houses. Fortunately for me, this year my family is staying local, but that doesn’t mean everyone will be so fortunate. Indeed, this year misfortune will befall many travelers.

Wednesday, of course, is one of the busier travel days of the year, and it was already a headache. Even at the late hour that I am writing this, there is a blob of precipitation moving from the Tennessee and Ohio Valleys northeast towards New England. There is an oscillating warm front extending from an area of low pressure centered south of Memphis, extending northeastward towards Pittsburgh. Right now, this blob is all rain, and it’s causing some flight headaches to areas in and around the shower activity, including hubs like Cincinnati.

Of course, I have to say “right now” because that is going to change, even overnight in some of the areas where rain is falling. Cold air is blowing in from the north. Where skies are still clear, it’s already down to the 30s, on it’s way colder, and ready to bring snow to the southern Great Lakes by tomorrow morning, and even some Lake effect snow to western New York.

Compounding the issue is that the low is going to be following the boundary to the northeast. By the time the turkey is served tomorrow, the system will be centered around New York City. This means wind and amplified rain all along the I-95 Corridor, but also, as low pressure gets significantly more focused, the cold air will wrap in more assertively. More substantial snow is coming for interior New England and New York through the day tomorrow, and it is expected to be wind driven and very disruptive. Plans to get home tomorrow without any problems are probably a fool’s errand at this point. Snow won’t really wind down in New England until after midnight, even if rain cuts off along the Seaboard before that time.

The good news, on the other hand, is that this feature is going to scoot out pretty quick. You won’t be trapped with inlaws all weekend. In fact, if you are in a reasonably sized town, I would say that you will have a good chance of still making it to the mall for Black Friday, if that is still a thing that people do. Cold air is then going to dive into the middle of the country, and continue to blow over the Great Lakes, meaning more snow in the UP, western Michigan and around Buffalo, but a pretty decent weekend to decompress from the holidays.

Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving!

I’m not the only Ryan H. in the weather world. I tried my hand at Youtube, and I was reminded as to why I never panned out as an on air meteorologist. If you are deep into the internet as this website, or maybe you found me through my books, perhaps you have also intersected with Ryan Hall, another well known internet weatherman, who has something I never did: technological savvy and organization. And probably more time to dedicate to this craft.

Of course, there are huge differences between Ryan Hall and Ryan Henning, talent levels aside. I focus on individual, site specific forecasting and synoptic scale discussions. Ryan Hall makes videos discussing major weather stories, and will go live with coverage of outbreaks. He is connected with storm chasers, and can bring in live video from storms as they happen. I am out here just writing stuff, occasionally sharing a video.

I’m filling a gap that nobody, perhaps, needed filled. Ryan Hall is looking to fill in the gaps that the traditional TV powerhouses has not filled. Not only his Hall on the big events, breaking them down on Youtube, but he has now launched a 24/7 video feed, and set it to music that other fans of “Local on the 8’s” can get behind. Check out the stream below:

I noted at the launch of Fox Weather that they were filling in a bit of a gap. They were focused almost exclusively on live weather, rather than studio shows, scheduled programming or commentary. The Weather Channel has sort of evolved into something that resembles an offering that should be on Discovery Plus, and Fox Weather was different, however they too are finding it hard to fill a day with JUST the weather this day in age.

Accuweather and WeatherNation are more niche offerings, but they attempt to cover the day’s weather headlines and are finding that the most effective way to do that is to pretape segments and re-air them every half hour or so. Hall’s newly launched 24/7 livestream, shared above, cycles through the alerts and warnings, focusing on the most significant weather, and inserting some automated text from an AI system. Hall has eliminated the desire to make television rather than cover the weather, and he has eliminated the overhead that Accuweather and WeatherNation were attempting to avoid.

Like I said, this is perfect for the fans of Local on the 8’s, but with better graphics and better technology. If you like to go old school, I suppose you could always go that route while Ryan Hall works out the last few kinks. I’m sure it won’t take him long.

I am someone who reflexively shirks the adaptation and rapid proliferation of new terminology, even if that terminology has existed in other circles for quite some time. This has been extremely common over the last 15-20 years in the weather community, from the Polar Vortex to a Bomb Cyclone to the Atmospheric River. I shirk because, to an item, when they hit the popular zeitgeist, and are uniformly misused.

I’m coming around on the usage of some of these terms though. I have a friend who works closely in science communication, and she has expressed an appreciation for terms like these, which can either clearly indicate what is going on for the lay person, in terms of impacts and importantly, how to prepare of these storms. When the Weather Service is using this terminology, it’s good, when Jimmy Fallon is using the terminology, it’s probably not good.

So with all that said, I head a national meteorologist describe the recent and deadly weather in the Pacific Northwest as a “double whammy” that included a Bomb Cyclone followed by an Atmospheric River. This is fine with me, as we have the expectation that a bomb cyclone will bring very strong winds, and an atmospheric river brings heavy rain. That’s what happened, that’s what residents of the area prepared for, and in the interest of being complete pedantic, was meteorologically misleading.

It wasn’t so much a double whammy as one really big whammy. First, let’s make sure we have a basic definition of what each are. An atmospheric river is a jet stream that flows from the Pacific Ocean to the west coast. In a bygone era, we may have called this the Pineapple Express for example, but the atmospheric river nomenclature is applied to any jet streak intersection with the west coast. The jet is always a conduit for moisture, but because of a semi permanent ridge off the California coast, doesn’t always intersect with the west coast, making it more remarkable.

A bomb cyclone is an area of low pressure (an extratropical cyclone) develops explosively, specifically by dropping an average of 1 mb an hour as the low pressure deepens. This doesn’t happen often, and when it does, in encourages very strong winds. Bomb cyclones are almost always developed over the sea, where friction doesn’t inhibit the development, which means winds also reach some pretty extraordinary velocities.

One important component to a bomb developing is a strong jet streak. Low pressure develops on the left side of a jet at th point the wind starts to decelerate, if you are following the course of the wind, particularly in trough environments. In fact, the jet is often interpreted at the surface as a cold frontal boundary, trailing the low pressure.

So an overwater cyclone develops with the help of a strong overwater jet streak. If the cyclone moves inland, it is very possible, even likely the jet will follow. At atmospheric river, in this parlance, is an ingredient in the development of a bomb cyclone. The bomb cyclone then moves inland, with the atmospheric river in close pursuit.

The terms make sense, and I don’t have a problem with their usage, but now there is a little bit of background for you.

It’s mid-November, and temperatures are getting cooler and days are getting shorter. Certainly, both are factors in making things a little depressing. The cold keeps us inside, and the lack of daylight makes things dark, quite literally.

But even in the daylight, it can often seem more grim. When it’s sunny, that usually means it’s colder in the morning, but another huge factor is the lower Lifting Condensation Level (LCL) that comes with winter. The LCL is level at which air lifted from the surface would reach the condensation point in the atmosphere. In practice, this is the height at which the bases of clouds form.

A given “parcel” of air will see temperatures drop at a known rate with height, based on established atmospheric physics. As we know with fog and clouds, moisture can only be retained in air to a certain temperature before it condenses. This is also why we have dew in the morning – that is when temperatures are coolest, and the air can’t hold the moisture any longer.

Cold air holds less moisture, and the atmosphere is colder in at all levels in the winter. As air at the surface is generally warmer than air aloft, it is prone to rising until it meets the LCL, at which point clouds start to form. Clouds are more likely in the cooler weather because the air can’t hold moisture, and the LCL is lower because the change in temperature from the surface to the point which the air can’t bear as much water is smaller, so those clouds are going to have low bases. There will be more clouds, and they will be lower to the ground. It’s dingy and claustrophobic, even in the day time.

But at least night comes earlier. At least spring is only 6 months away.