03.13.10
Posted in General News, Weather News at 11:28 am by Rebekah
The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race is underway in Alaska.
Last Saturday, 71 teams set out from Anchorage on their approximately 1,100-mile-long journey to Nome. As of today, the leading musher, Jeff King, is well over halfway done with the race.
Although there is currently an extratropical cyclone in the Gulf of Alaska, it looks like snow and blizzard conditions will be limited to southern Alaska. On the other hand, there will be no shortage of cold weather for the mushers and dogs!
It’s currently 28 below in Nome, and the NWS is calling for a high today of 10 below. Yesterday, tonight’s low was forecast to be 25 below with a wind chill of 50 below, but today it’s been updated to only 20 below with a wind chill of only 40 below! No wonder most of the mushers come from Alaska–there are probably few other people that could withstand the cold. 🙂
According to the National Climatic Data Center, Nome’s average high in March is 17.7 °F and average low is 0.5 ºF. The record cold temperature for Nome, not including wind chill, is -54 ºF (records date back to 1900).
For more information on the Iditarod, and up-to-date information on the current standings and location of the teams, check out the official site of the Iditarod.
Iditarod route; this year the teams are taking the northern route. Courtesy of The Official Site of the Iditarod.
Alaskan weather forecast for today. Courtesy of the National Weather Service in Anchorage.
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03.10.10
Posted in General News, Severe Weather Forecast, Severe Weather Nowcast at 11:34 pm by Rebekah
I posted my chase log and photos from Monday on my website. See the homepage link on the right side of this page. Or click here.
A large upper-level low pressure system, associated fronts and a dryline, moderate instability, and ample wind shear are responsible for severe thunderstorms breaking out today from Kansas to Texas to Alabama. Five tornadoes have been reported so far in Arkansas and Louisiana, with more possible tonight in the Mississippi River Valley region.
A ridge of high pressure is building on the East Coast, and this is going to block the upper-low and keep it from moving out into the Atlantic for the next few days. This means more severe weather could be possible in the eastern US over the next couple of days.
And now, for a special announcement–I have re-discovered Armor All. Sunday afternoon, in anticipation of chasing on Monday, I decided to thoroughly clean out my car. My dashboard was getting woefully dusty, and my trunk was a mess. The other day at Walmart, I saw some Armor All cleaning wipes and remembered that when I was a kid, my Dad wanted me to use Armor All to clean and protect the interior of our car. I don’t think I thought much of the product back then; probably because I didn’t always do the best job of wiping down the car. Or I just didn’t appreciate it. Anyway, I tried using the cleaning wipes on my dashboard on Sunday, and I was blown away. I think my car must have been really dusty and dirty, because I wiped down every inch of the dashboard, console, and door panels, and now–my car glows! Well, at least on the inside. So go out and buy some Armor All–it will make your car look new and happy again. Thanks, Dad. 🙂
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02.28.10
Posted in General News at 7:56 pm by Rebekah
Congratulations Canada! The Vancouver 2010 Olympics had some great moments, and although the US will go home with the most medals, Team Canada received the most gold. The US/Canada hockey game today was great; I was on the edge of my seat, screaming at my TV towards the end of the game, and couldn’t have been more excited when Zach Parise scored a goal with less than 25 seconds left, to force the game into overtime. I was disappointed that the US couldn’t pull off the upset, but somehow it seemed fitting that Canada should win gold in Vancouver on the final day of the Olympics, and I certainly don’t begrudge them a gold medal in hockey.
In light of the recent snowstorms in the Northeast, and the media’s constant desire to over-hype everything, I found this article rather amusing: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35627330/ns/weather/ What was even more amusing was the response I heard from some of the meteorological community, including from some of those who were “quoted” in the article.
Central Oklahoma may get a little snow tomorrow, but it looks like we may be starting to head towards some warmer temperatures towards the end of the week.
Happy Birthday to my sister Caitlin today! 🙂
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02.21.10
Posted in General News at 4:15 pm by Rebekah
Surprise, surprise…the GFS model is no longer looking good for chasing on Saturday. 🙂 A couple of rather vigorous-looking troughs are now forecast to move through the Southern Plains on Thursday and Sunday…I’ll certainly keep a close eye on this situation, but it’s not looking quite as interesting.
I woke up at about 3:30 this morning to the sound of thunder. It was very exciting to just see lightning and hear thunder again! A squall line/MCS was stretched from Kansas to Texas.
As usual, I’ve been so busy lately I have not been able to spend as much time working on my website as I would like. My goal is to get all of my chase logs, photos, and videos posted before the first chase of the year. As it looks like that first decent chase may be another couple weeks or so, I *might* be able to get that done. I hope to start working on 2007 chase logs this week, and then the two from 2006 and three from 2005. I’ve also got more work to do on my weather app for the forecast page. That may take a little while yet before I reveal what I’ve been working on. Somehow I’m afraid it won’t look nearly as impressive as the many lines of code that it will take to get the little app up and running. 🙂
Team USA is playing Team Canada tonight in Olympic men’s ice hockey. I’ve found the Olympics pretty interesting this year; I’ve even watched a bit of curling for the first time. That has got to be one of the strangest sports, yet it is so mesmerizing.
To close this random post, check out this video on YouTube where a NASA rocket flies through some cirrus clouds. It is absolutely amazing. You’ll see a shockwave travel throughout the cirrus clouds and obliterate a sundog!
Sonic Boom Meets Sundog
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02.10.10
Posted in General News at 5:35 pm by Rebekah
I haven’t been working on the website much in the past couple of weeks as I have been too busy taking care of other irons in the fire. I would like to display a current weather banner on the forecast page of my website, along with some recent and relevant weather maps and a discussion, but I was not able to find any customizable banners that I liked. So…I decided to try my hand at designing my own. So far I have written several hundred lines of code in Perl that will take encoded weather observations from the National Weather Service, translate them into English, and display the results. However, currently the display is nothing fancy; so now I’m using my limited knowledge of Visual Basic to write code that will display the info in a “pretty” format. Stay tuned…hopefully I can get at least a prototype up and running in the next couple of weeks, depending on my other work.
I just received some good news today. My paper (based on my master’s thesis work on lightning) is one step closer to being published! I met with my previous adviser (from my M.S.) today, and after reading my draft last week, he thinks it looks pretty good! Most of his comments on the draft were regarding minor revisions, so it looks like the biggest part I’ll have to expand on will be the conclusions, as I had expected.
I also met with a professor in the OU School of Meteorology today to discuss PhD research ideas. I’m currently teaching this year, but looking for funding in meteorology/GIS. Very good news–his research ideas sound amazingly interesting, and he would like to have me work on the project! He is currently putting the finishing touches on a grant that he expects to be accepted in another month or two (probably the end of April by the latest). Without going into too much detail here, suffice it to say it would be another project in lightning, but with more of a spatial analysis angle. I would work on developing some new tools for visualizing and analyzing lightning data and then use those tools to answer some questions about lightning (mostly cloud-to-ground) and why it strikes where it does.
Tomorrow I hope to post on a few reasons as to why this winter has been the way it has been…primarily focusing on the cold and snow in the South and East. Hint: it may have something to do with a couple of little phenomena called the NAO and El Niño. Then on Friday…it’s the start of the Vancouver/Whistler winter Olympics! I’ll try to get some time to post on what the weather’s going to be like…will it snow or will it rain?
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