Good Monday, everyone. We continue to track rounds of heavy rain producing showers and storms across our region. This kicks off another week of much cooler than normal weather with additional rounds of showers and storms rolling through.
Sunday saw the rainfall numbers really adding up. Several areas picked up 1-2.5″ of rain on the day. Today’s rains may cause some local high water issues through the early afternoon. This action will taper off from west to east through the day with highs in the 70s. Track away…
Additional shower and storms will fire up later this week and carry us through the upcoming weekend and into early next week. While this isn’t a constant rain, locally heavy rain numbers will be possible, leading to some issues on occasion. Temps continue to run well below normal for this time of year.
The average rainfall numbers from the GFS Ensembles show a very active pattern across the eastern half of the country for the next few weeks…
By the end of the month, temps should rebound, giving us some normal or even slightly above normal numbers…
You can clearly see how the WeatherBell CFS 5 day average temp anomalies to end August are toasty to our north, but cooler to our south.
The warm anomalies do not stay around very long. Watch the cool temps show up on the 5 day average centered on Labor Day week…
And the following 5 days…
There’s something to be said about persistence when it comes to seasonal forecasting. Can this pattern hang through the upcoming fall and winter months? Hmmm
Make it a great Monday and take care.
I doubt it.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/tulsa-oklahoma-tornado-national-weather-service-no-warning/
If we were to get an early fall, then you can bank on shorts and tank tops for Christmas. Normal fall temps and a little below normal for December is all we need.
Whew, this Tulsa twister hit after 1am which is particularly scary. It’s been given a preliminary rating of low-end EF2. I don’t pretend to know much at this point about this storm, but if it was a squall-line twister then that could figure why there was no advance warning. Unlike supercell tornadoes, squall-line twisters are on average weaker but can have a lot less warning time as they can spin up so quickly.
Furthermore, tornadoes are relatively uncommon in the middle and southern states during the late summer (except for relatively weak hurricane spawned tornadoes). Kentucky and Tennessee have had no August tornadoes stronger than F2/EF2 in recorded history. One has to go way way back to 1854 for the last time Kentucky had a August tornado with loss of life.
https://kyweathercenter.com/?p=15304#comment-167965
Apparently that squall line was moving so quickly the NWS just didn’t have time enough to detect nor warn the public about the embedded tornado in the squall line.
I’m sure when the NWS starting seeing reports coming in of damage they were having a Oh crap moment, but probably more explicit.
True, the current Doppler NEXRAD radars were a vast improvement over earlier non-Doppler radars. NEXRAD has also been improved in recent years with additions like dual-pol, upgraded algorithms and software (and some hardware).
Still, NEXRAD has been in service three decades and the radars have been showing their age. They are not without limits, and perhaps the Tulsa event showed NEXRAD is a bit slow. In many ways, phased array radar will likely be the next big step as it is showing to be much faster and more versatile than NEXRAD. It might easily be another decade before phased array widely replaces NEXRAD and other similar radars, though.
All I know it can be somewhat difficult to detect a tornado that’s in a fast moving squall line. Usually embedded tornado’s in a squall line are fairly weak however damage was surprisingly fairly extensive in this case. As most know much easier to see a tornado signature on a individual supercell than a squall line.
Mike S, what was the rainfall amount in Valley Station yesterday?
I had 0.68″…other surrounding locations averaged between 0.50″ to 1.00″. I’m already at 1.17″ for the first week after last month’s dismal 1.74″ monthly tally.