05.14.11
Posted in Astronomy, Space Shuttle, Traveling at 4:40 pm by Rebekah
Well, I’m back in DeLand, Florida for NASA Tweetup Redux, as many are calling it.
If all goes well, those of us invited to the Tweetup a couple weeks ago will get to watch the retraction of the Rotating Service Structure (wraps around the shuttle) around noon tomorrow, from about 600 yards away! This is what I was waiting up for (and never saw) the night I saw this incredible shelf cloud over the Vehicle Assembly Building.
I have to arrive around 11 am (times are all EDT) and will be back at the press site by about 1:30 pm.
Then I’m going to have to get up really early Monday morning for the launch. The launch is scheduled for 8:56 am, but if we want to be there to see the astronauts drive by in the astrovan (and not turn around, as they did the last time I was there!), I need to be there no later than 5 am. It takes about an hour and a half from where I’m staying to the Cape, so you do the math…
There is a frontal squall line rolling through Florida at present; hopefully there will not be any lingering, morning thunderstorms on Monday. We also need storm-free weather tomorrow for the RSS retraction.
I flew through Atlanta today, and we had about a 20 – 30 minute delay in air (to Orlando), as we had to fly around thunderstorms on the Florida Coast. We flew out over the Atlantic for a little ways before circling back around. It was still a rather turbulent landing, though. After I picked up my rental car, I drove through some torrential downpours to get here.
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05.13.11
Posted in Astronomy, Space Shuttle, Traveling at 11:32 am by Rebekah
I’m flying back to Florida tomorrow for the space shuttle launch. NASA invited those of us invited to the STS134 Tweetup to come back for the retraction of the Rotating Service Structure on Sunday (we can watch it from about 600 yards away!) as well as the launch of Endeavour on Monday (we can view it from the press site again).
Hopefully there won’t be any more hardware problems and the weather will be good for launch!
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05.12.11
Posted in Weather News at 8:00 am by Rebekah
The Mississippi River is at or near record flood stage in Memphis.
Hydrograph for the Mississippi River at Memphis, as of 9:45 pm CDT on 11 May 2011, from the NWS
It’s hard for me to believe that I was sitting on the banks of the rising Mississippi River at Memphis just 2.5 weeks ago. I went to Harbortown, a very nice neighborhood on the river that is now sadly flooding.
Mississippi River from Memphis, looking towards the I-40 bridge, on 25 April 2011
Harbortown in Memphis, on the banks of the Mississippi River (these rocks are the same as those just barely in the foreground of the first photo…there is one road that separates the houses from the grassy area)…note also the Purple Martin house! Taken on 25 April 2011
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05.11.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:19 pm by Rebekah
The cap won today in western Oklahoma. Yesterday it looked like today would be a fairly promising dryline day, but some early day convection kind of messed things up.
High clouds rather quickly spread over western Oklahoma this afternoon, and Jeff and I drove all the way out to just west of Buffalo (pretty much at the eastern edge of the Oklahoma Panhandle) only to see a line of mushy cumulus trying to get going but failing under the cirrus.
We’re on our way back to Norman now. It was disappointing to not see any storms in northwest Oklahoma, but at least we saw some rain, hail, and lightning, just north of Oklahoma City on our way up here!
The Storm Prediction Center has just issued a Mesoscale Discussion for this part of Oklahoma and southwest Kansas, mentioning that if convection can get going we could have some supercells. However, I’m not buying it right now (at least that we would have storms before dark), and I’d rather not wait around much longer when there aren’t even any solid cumulus congestus.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 3:52 pm by Rebekah
We’re about 50 miles east of Woodward on Highway 412. We got slowed up a bit by the heavy rain and hail on I-35, as well as several slow vehicles on other highways we took (e.g., a house going up Highway 77).
I’m a little discouraged by the increased cloudiness in western Oklahoma. The better target area does appear to be western (especially southwestern) Kansas, but I don’t think we’ll be able to make it up there in time. We’ll head north soon at Highway 281, and probably evaluate what we want to do when we get to about Waynoka.
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