01.21.10
Exciting Weather
Last semester when I took Weather Briefing, a 1-credit, 3-day-a-week discussion of weather maps, occasionally my fellow classmates and I would get into a bit of trouble with our instructor for calling the weather “boring” when it was our time to lead the weather discussion. There’s always something going on in the weather world, somewhere on the planet! =) Today, the weather in the U.S. is far from boring.
There is so much to talk about, it’s difficult to know where to start. A 977-mb low continues to hammer California, as the fourth low-pressure system has come ashore at San Francisco. A potent trough assisted in the deepening of the low earlier today. The jet stream is now in a solid El Niño pattern, taking storms on a west-east track across the southern U.S. It’s raining along most of the California coast and Arizona and snowing in the Sierra Nevada and southern Rockies. I imagine all the rain is a result of a combination of a number of a factors: the low, the fronts (occluded front alon the coast, warm front in southern Arizona), a large amount of positive vorticity advection in southern California and southern Arizona, and the fact that these are coastal storms being lifted up coastal mountain ranges. Despite the recent drought, California is certainly not lacking in moisture right now.
There was also enough instability and wind shear combined with the strong lifting in order to produce several tornadoes today, around Santa Barbara, the California/Arizona border, and near Phoenix. There were also a couple of tornadoes today around Huntsville, Alabama, associated with the other low in the U.S. that assisted in bringing some lovely thunderstorms to Norman last night. There’s plenty of instability and lift out there as well, but as I’ve often seen with winter thunderstorms, the thermodynamics and the dynamics didn’t line up very well so the area of greatest shear was displaced from the area of greatest instability and lift. I think this must be a significant reason as to why there were just a few weak tornadoes, rather than any strong tornadoes.
The California system will make it out to the Missisissippi River valley and Gulf Coast in a few days, bringing a chance for more severe weather and potentially some weak tornadoes again. I haven’t looked at that forecast in much detail yet, but that will have to wait.
The Dallas Stars just lost to the Vancouver Canucks, in Vancouver–it was a sad ending, as Dallas was tied at 2 for a while before Vancouver got two goals in the third period. Dallas came back to score one more goal with just 2.8 seconds left, but it was too little, too late. They lost 3-4. The Stars are the only hockey team we get on TV here, so I’ve decided they should be my favorite hockey team (as I didn’t become very interested in hockey until a few years ago, sadly). On a much brighter note, the Mariners signed Felix Hernandez (my favorite Mariners pitcher for several years–he’s their ace now) to a 5-year contract extension, through 2014! The Mariners continue to make great moves in an attempt to finally become a playoff contender again.
Bring on the spring: storm chasing and baseball!! =D