Ice Storm Damage

Gusty winds overnight caused more tree limbs to break around the area. As an intense arctic high builds over southern Saskatchewan this afternoon, winds will increase out of the North gusting up to as high as 40 mph. This wind will wreak havoc on many of the ice covered trees and power lines in the area. I have a feeling that the damage from the ice storm will be done overnight tonight by these very strong winds...Here are some more pictures I took this morning.

6" diameter tree limbs down

Turkeys scurry across the field

12/18 - 12/19 Ice Storm

Below are some pictures I was able to capture early this morning after an ice storm glazed our house with 3/8" of ice. About an inch of sleet fell before the freezing rain, so a mess of ice is now packed solid into the side roads and driveways.

Ironic?

We lost a few branches around the yard...

Bird feeder is an ice palace

Snow Update

Storm total of 4"of wet slushy snow as of 9 PM in west DeKalb.

Level II radar loop of the entire storm (large file)
Animated GIF of the snowfall so far (large file)

Notice the melting after the initial accumulation, then the reaccumulation of snow when the sun started to set.

A typical view outside our complex

California Wildfires

A few people have been asking, and I haven't blogged in a while, so I thought I would talk about the wildfires in Southern California that have devastated over an estimated 10,000 acres through early Sunday morning. Fires continue to blaze early Sunday with some incredible pictures coming in to CNN via their I-report feature. Earlier this week, the Storm Prediction Center had a critical outlook for fire weather in Southern California due to a reversal of flow down-sloping off the Santa Ana's towards Los Angeles. These Santa Ana winds occur when east-to-west flow develops over the Santa Ana mountains, descends, and becomes very warm and dry.

Surface map illustrating the warm and dry conditions favorable for wildfires

These winds, similar to the Chinook winds that are frequent this time of year, can easily reach 50 mph! This obviously helps to spread a wildfire and makes a firefighters job virtually impossible. A diagram I pulled off the internet helps explain this process visually:

The windward side of mountian ranges feature many different types of trees and vegetation that are supported by the plethora of precipitation that the windward mountain side receives. If you now reverse the flow of the air in the diagram above, the warm and dry air is decending over forests and in this case towards million dollar pads in eastern Orange county.

Pesky high pressure contributes to east-to-west flow over the Santa Ana mountains
Visible satellite image of the wildfires in SoCal (click to enlarge)

DMB at the Gorge

Unbelievable. That pretty much sums up this year's labor day weekend at the Gorge. Dave Matthews Band was headlining the weekend as he has in the past, but this weekend would prove to be a special one for fans and for the band. It was the first trip to the Gorge without saxophone player LeRoi Moore. LeRoi's death was a surprise to many, as an embolism from a June ATV accident would ultimately end his life. The band was very emotional during their 30th appearance at the venue and played with passion that some bands can only dream of. The band put on some of the best shows of the year, and as always, did not fail to awe. The Gorge is truly a magical place, and if your favorite band is lucky enough to play there, I highly recommend attending.

A view from the hotel in Seattle
How much can you pack in a PT cruiser? Good thing we're good at Tetris!
A view of our campsite
A view from the top of the lawn. What a venue!
Cliff overlooking the Columbia River

The Best of July '08

A collection of my best pictures from this month. Enjoy!

A rapidly rising tower forms a pileus cloud

A nasty early morning MCS produces 70+ mph winds on 7-21-08


7-21-08 radar loop (click to enlarge)

A female white-tailed deer feeds in the backyard

A blinding CG on 7-8-08

7-8-08 radar loop (click to enlarge)

Father's day or son's Day?

Father's day is usually all about Dad's, but this one certainly seemed like it was a gift to me instead of my father! The day started off with a bang as I was awoke early to a small elevated MCS traversing through Illinois that produced a beautiful shelf cloud according to Tavis's pictures. The MCS quickly exited allowing for rapid destabilization from late morning till early afternoon before a large thunderstorm complex quickly blew up right over top of us. This storm produced the largest hail I have seen to date in Illinois!

Anvil shield from the early afternoon convection to the west

Penny to walnut size hail!
Posing with a handful of small hail

Little did we know, the storms were not done yet! Yet another round of storms initiated off to our west with some surprising structure. These storms were very intense and very short lived. My guess is that they relieved any of the instability that the early afternoon convection missed...
This storm fired and quickly produced a wall cloud type lowering before quickly dissipating...The images were taken with my phone and are not of the best quality...One thing to observe is the northwest flow nature of the storm and the "reflection view" of a typical southwesterly flow supercell.

Notice the precip core on the left side of the storm rather than the right...

Things quickly settled down after this exciting storm to a normal father's day. We were treated to a beautiful sunset and some hard to photograph hummingbirds!

Breathtaking sunset
Reflection of CB off of the lake

Dad posing next to his pride and joy
Curly enjoys the evening
This guy was hard to photograph!

6/11--Deadly Iowa HP's

The day after my birthday was shaping up to be an interesting day for tornadic supercells in western IA. After picking up Dustin in Oglesby and Travis (another NIU chaser) near Princeton, IL, we headed for our initial target of Council Bluffs, IA. After passing through the Quad Cities, I noticed that the right front tire was shaking violently and that it was going to need to be replaced. Luckily for us, a tire center in Des Moines was able to get us right in and after about an hour of labor, we were back on our way to western IA. We arrived to our target a little behind schedule, but were excited to see the rapidly strengthening storms off to our SW.

Shot of an initial supercell forming to our west

Unfortunately for everyone involved, these storms quickly what meteorologists call HP or High Precipitation. These storms are often very hazardous to many for lots of reasons...Storm chasers and others in the path of the storm because it is very hard to find and identify where circulations are in the storm; National Weather Service forecasters because they rarely have ground truth of these circulations until after they have wreaked havoc on their targets; and their obvious title of very heavy rain producers that causes flash flooding in a matter of minuets.

HP storm that quickly "wrapped up" and passed over the Boy Scout camp...

These sort of situations are always a blow to the stomach to everyone involved and no chaser ever wants to see anyone injured while chasing after mother nature...One chaser even had to bail out of his vehicle after realizing that a circulation was passing right over him! This day was certainly a dangerous chase day, and my thoughts and prayers go out to everyone that had their lives changed due to this event. After staying ahead of the HP blob, it started to coalesce with other HP monsters into a large MCS. We stayed ahead of this mess of convection on I-80, stopping frequently to sample the shelf and lightning.

Typical view of the shelf along I-80 just west of Des Moines

CG bolt near Des Moines

6/4-6/5 Bust and Realization

Everything seemed to be falling into place for a two day severe weather episode, so Dustin and I decided to head to the NE, IA border to catch some action. Initially, Wednesday seemed to be the day that was going to an appetizer as the orientation of the upper level trough was still positive and less progressive than the progged upper level flow for Thursday. We basically figured that any convection we could catch Wednesday would be icing to the cake. In summary, Wednesday turned out to be better than Thursday despite the better looking atmospheric conditions on Thursday (more on this later).
After reviewing some data while stopping at Sonic in Des Moines, IA, our initial target was Aurora, NE. While driving to our target we noticed many storms firing of to the west of Aurora near Kearney and Grand Island. We still decided to keep our target due to the very agitated nature of the cumulus clouds outside our windows between Lincoln and Aurora. To our liking, a pair of supercells fired along this northward lifting boundary and put us in the perfect position to chase.

Initial storm north of Aurora, NE, lacking strong low-level inflow
The TIV (Tornado Intercept Vehicle) contemplates on a target

Storms seemed to be lacking a low-level inflow, and with darkness approaching we decided to call it quits near Lincoln, NE. While checking into our hotel, many mexican men were standing outside of the entrance to the hotel amazed by the wind, rain and lightning from the leftover convection. Did I also mention that they were downing 24 oz. beers? Sure enough, we found one of them with a phone up to his ear passed out on the steps leading up to the room.

Yes hunny, I'll make it home for breakfast tomorrow.

After a few laughs, we noticed that the lightning on the backside of the convection we were following was amazing. Must say that it was the best display of anvil zit lighting that I have seen to date.

"Anvil Zits" outside of Lincoln, NE

Dessert after the main course.

After returning to the room, attention quickly turned to Thursday's chasing prospects. After waking up to the largest Storm Prediction Center high risk that I have ever chased, I was anxiously awaiting the afternoon convection. Even though the morning high risk was primarily for a threat of damaging wind, it was apparent that a small area in E central NE was becoming ripe for tornadic supercells (see MD below).

Mesoscale Discussion issued shortly after we left Lincoln

I will now go into quite a bit of detail about Thursday's bust...

After choosing York, NE as a target we noticed some convection starting to fire on radar to our west near Grand Island and we immediately traveled west to scope out the action. It was obvious that these storms were not tapping the uncapped surfaced based instability that the SPC mesoanalysis was showing (see below).

17 Z Surface Based CAPE

Notice the lackluster appearance of the convection along the boundary in S central NE

What was happening? You can clearly see that the storms in northwestern KS were thriving in an environment that seemed much less favorable for supercellular convection. After a few minuets of watching this convection moving out of CO and into KS, we decided to try to intercept these quickly moving supercells, with a flying V appearance on radar, as they would hopefully move near the Red Cloud, NE area. The pair of supercells was moving into a very favorable environment rich with extreme theta-e and backing winds along a N-S oriented pseudo dryline. All I could keep thinking is that this was it, these were going to be the storms that we have been waiting for... We made it to Red Cloud, NE with time to spare and fueled up while watching radar. We were very curious to see what was going to happen when these storms hit the boundary and moved into a much better conceptual severe storm environment. The radar scan after the storm hit the boundary, and I mean right after, the storm immediately lost all of its rotation and started to dissipate into a non-severe shelf cloud. WHAT? Hmm...You would THINK that this storm was moving into a much more favorable environment. What was wrong with the airmass on the east side of this boundary? It was clearly having trouble sustaining any sort of an updraft the entire day. One hypothesis could be that the airmass to the east of this boundary was capped despite the RUC's analysis in the SPC mesoanalysis. Wouldn't this boundary help break that cap?

What happened when the supercell that looked so good on radar hit the boundary? Boundaries are supposed to be areas of enhanced vorticity and wind shear. Was it the orientation that storm crossed the boundary that made it dissipate and turn into a shelf cloud? So many questions were running through my mind on the long drive back to Illinois...One thing for sure is that we as meteorologists still know very little as far a mesoscale processes in these sorts of situations. Who knows, maybe someone will do a case study for the event, but I find it unlikely due to the lack of 18Z soundings behind this psuedo dryline... Now 0-5 while chasing high risk events and 0-4 inside of PDS tornado watches. I'm becoming more frustrated every time I see a high risk...one. It always seems like there is just way to much going on!

Disappointingly, the best picture of the day

Time lapse of the shelf cloud

Bust, War Wound, & End of Trip 1

Today started off at the Budget King motel in Salina, KS. I have to say that the stay was not that bad considering how cheap we got the room. Anyway, it was evident at the beginning of the day that we were going to have to head south and west to catch nice convection during the day. Our initial target was Greensburg, KS although we ended up just east of Greensburg in Pratt, KS so we could grab some food and some internet data. As you may remember, Greensburg was the town that was devastated by an EF-5 tornado on May 4th, 2007. We began heading towards Greensburg after noticing that an outflow boundary from early morning convection was sagging southwest through our area. It was a nice cool down, but we knew we wanted to catch the initiating storms to our southwest and then follow them as they interacted with this mesoscale boundary. These storms were again outflow dominant for the most part, as well as large hail producers. In fact, while chasing the only good looking storm on radar back towards Pratt, we were munched by the core of another developing storm. This was by far and away the largest hail I've ever encountered... We were pounded by hail anywhere from about penny to egg size. The vehicle sustained a small windshield crack just above the drivers side, as well as other small dents on the roof. Fortunately for us, we were able to get out of the large hail core and head east of Prat and eventually called it quits in Wichita, KS. Numerous chasers stuck in the hail core behind us reported tennis to baseball sized hail in the location that we were just able to get by. Unfortunately, many of those chasers suffered broken windshields and windows that immediately ended their chase. Overall, a great chascation with a cooperative weather pattern and some great supercells as we will call an end to trip 1 while a ridge dominates the central plains for a couple days. Will post pictures of the war wound tomorrow, and unfortunately we do not have pictures of the large hail because we were trying to get out of it!

Initial Convection...