It's been a stormy day across West Tennessee and North Mississippi as a complex of storms moved through the region this evening generating multiple instances of severe wind. The storms that caused these are still moving southeastward through Northeast Mississippi but have lost their severe punch. Even though it appears these storms will miss Starkville and the Golden Triangle in Mississippi there is the possibility that an isolated storm or two will try to form off the western end of these tonight.
Storms will once again be a possibility tomorrow but they shouldn't be as potent or widespread. We'll have the moist, warm air in place to fuel storms but there won't be any real trigger besides a small upper-level disturbance or two that could try to form and move through. Friday night will be the best chance for storms in the near future though as a cold front sweeps through West Tennessee and North Mississippi. Since these storms will move through earlier in the evening across West Tennessee there is the possibility of a few of these going severe. The chance for severe weather decreases as you move southward into North Mississippi thanks to the later timing during Friday night that they'll be moving through. Will the rain be out of the picture in time for the Mississippi State/Auburn game on Saturday at 11am here in Starkville? It looks like that may be the case at this point but it's too far out to know for certain since the front will be exiting the region sometime during the morning. The big story instead of the storms will be the much cooler, much drier air behind the cold front. We're talking about highs in the upper 70's this weekend in West Tennessee and highs in the lower 80's across North Mississippi, both with low humidity. What a change! We just have to get through a Thursday and Friday full of the deplorable heat and humidity we've seen lately before the wonderful weekend weather arrives.
Looking for something to do tomorrow night? On the Travel Channel at 10 pm/9c tomorrow night a show called Extreme Tours will be airing and the first segment of the show will feature me and my pals at Storm Chasing Adventure Tours! A crew from the show came out to film and interview us as we chased this past spring in New Mexico and their footage along with clips from my library of tornado video will be airing. This program will showcase what we do as a tour group and how we make it happen. Quite a few of our tour guests and tour guides were interviewed for this and the camera crew that came rode along with us for a few hours. I did a sit-down interview with them along with an extensive round of showing off our vehicles and equipment. This should be a good show tomorrow and I'm certainly looking forward to my first appearance on a non-news national TV program! If you can't make it home in time to watch tomorrow be sure to set your DVR.
Storms yesterday in Central Kansas did not produce a tornado for us. We did see a very brief string-like funnel at one point, but that was about the extent of our tornadic sights for the day. There were many tornadoes that touched down with damage reported closer sunset with these storms, but we had to make the judgement call to bug out and get back to Oklahoma City in time for people to get on their flights home before this happened. If these storms had organized a little quicker I think our chances of getting on a tornado would of been much better. The day began with a stop in Russell, Kansas where the Center for Severe Weather Research's ROTATE project happened to stop by for awhile. We were able to visit with them a bit and take some great pictures!
The chase began near La Crosse, Kansas where we followed a couple of developing supercells that had quite a bit of dust kicking out from under their ouflow. We followed a right-moving cell for quite some time, all the way to Bunker Hill, Kansas, as it cycled through weak and strong stages. This is the storm that produced the aforementioned string-like funnel cloud. Many a wall cloud came from this storm, but it was just too disorganized of a structure to get things going for a tornado. The storm that would form quite a few tornadoes (including an EF2-rated one near... you guessed it... La Crosse, Kansas) finally got its act together just to our southwest near sunset, but we had to bug out just as that was happening because we were so far away from Oklahoma City where we needed to be so that our tour guests could fly out. It's really too bad that we had to miss these tornadoes, but that's part of having to deal with the logistics of tour guests and the unpredictability of storm chasing. The storm structures were certainly spectacular though and we did see quite a few gustnadoes and dust being blow around. Video from these storms will be processed and uploaded tomorrow night when I get some time.
Yesterday and today have really been the same day for me. After we finished chasing in Central Kansas we had to make a bee line for Oklahoma City, where we made it in to town just after 3:30am this morning. My flight left at 7:35am this morning meaning I had to be at the airport around 6am, so I actually had no time to sleep in the interim. It's good to be back home in Louisville after being so tired! During these three weeks I've been with Storm Chasing Adventure Tours this month we've gone 8,383 miles across Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas. There are so many areas that we visited this season that I've never been to before, especially near the Mexican border in Laredo, Texas and Big Bend National Park. But I'm not done yet. After a few weeks at home and abroad, I'll be back out storm chasing again for a week starting on June 23rd and going through the 30th. This is typically a time where severe weather is found up north in the Dakotas and Nebraska, so I'll be flying out to Denver in about a month's time to meet up with everyone. A photo album of this year's chase so far can be found on my Flickr and Facebook accounts along with the slideshow below:
Ever since earlier this week we've had our eye on today's setup in Central Kansas. The moisture return, a low developing over Southwest Kansas, and upper-level wind support all kept us coming back to look at the models to see how it was shaping up. For a while it looked like the cap, or a layer of instability-inhibiting warm air aloft, was going to surpress storm formation but now we're seeing a situation where there will be just enough break in the cap to allow for a few isolated supercell storms to form. To get surface heating today to break that cap we need to clear out the clouds across Kansas first. A push of dry air at around 10,000 feet is currently moving from Southwest Kansas to the northeast and is eating these clouds for breakfast as you see in the satellite image to the right. We expect this to keep moving throughout the day and hopefully it will clear out the clouds in time to get some serious surface heating going.
The big story here today is the moisture return. For the first time this week we are seeing a situation where dew points will surge into the mid to upper 60's. Yes! This much-needed moisture will be the fuel for storms this afternoon and should give us a much better show than the moisture-deprived low-precipitation storms we've been seeing lately. While we don't have this moisture in the area quite yet, it's streaming in like crazy right now. Strong easterly and southeasterly winds are blowing this moisture into Kansas from Missouri and Oklahoma and will continue doing so throughout the day. Having mostly easterly winds in Kansas right now is a very good thing because this is creating just about optimal low-level shear for rotating supercell storms.
Speaking of wind shear, this will create quite a bit of helicity, or a corkscrew-like rotation of air in the atmosphere. When you combine helicity with instability in an equation you get the Energy Helicity Index (EHI). As I've said before I think that indicies and parameters can be distracting since human analysis is always better than a formula, but EHI seems to be fairly reliable since it is so basic and relies on two very basic ingredients. This afternoon's EHI values in Kansas will be the highest we've seen out here this season according to the Rapid Refresh model. That's some great news for storm chasers because higher EHI values typically correlate with enhanced tornado potential.
The Storm Prediction Center has a Slight Risk for severe storms today from Iowa to the Texas Panhandle and within that a 5% tornado risk in Kansas. This is quite the change from the previously non-severe "general thunderstorm" outlooks that they had been issuing for today because of the concern that strong capping may inhibit storm development. Today is our last chase day out here for Tour 3 and my last day out here until I come back for a week in June. If we could see some good storms today that'd be a great end to the first part of my trip! Tonight once we're finished chasing we'll be traveling back to Oklahoma City where I'll fly back to Louisville from tomorrow morning.
Follow up-to-the-minute reports on our chase on my Twitter and Facebook accounts!
My apologies for not having a blog post this morning. There is no wireless data coverage here in Southeastern New Mexico for my iPad and therefore when I hit the "send" button on this morning's post, nothing happened! Today we traveled to Carlsbad, New Mexico, where we met up with a film crew from the Travel Channel. This crew is taping a show about "extreme tours" for the network and I'll have details on when the show will air as I get them.
Tomorrow we'll be heading to Carlsbad Caverns just up the road here and then on to Roswell for more sightseeing in this fabulous part of the country since prospects for storms tomorrow don't look good. There is a Slight Risk for storms in South Texas tomorrow, much like yesterday, but the forecast points toward more of an MCS-style storm scenario than a supercell one. Even if supercells do form down there, it's a very quick trip from where they'll be in Mexico (where we can't chase) through Texas to the Gulf of Mexico (where we can't chase for even more obvious reasons). So... We'll stay around here in Southeastern New Mexico where the mountains and ample moisture will provide storm chances for us tomorrow as we tour around the region. These won't be terribly severe, if at all, but this is probably our best chance to see storms given the lack of moisture around the Plains right now. Doesn't look like this pattern will break for the rest of the week unfortunately. As we head toward next week we're hopeful that things will change for the better.
Follow my updates on Twitter and Facebook throughout my chase!
I'm in Little Rock, AR for the weekend on a trip with the Mississippi State University Distinguished Scholars. We've had a blast so far and we're not through yet! Here's a picture of me inside a model of the Oval Office inside the Clinton Presidential Library when we visited yesterday:
The weather around here has been cloudy and cool, but the weather across the Southeast should clear out and warm up next week. There's a chance we could see another cold snap after next week, but it shouldn't be as strong as previous bouts of cold weather we've seen lately should it come to fruition.
I'll be going home to Louisville early next week and spending the rest of my spring break there, but it's been great fun visiting Arkansas! Don't forget to set your clocks one hour forward this evening!
I talked to a group of kindergarten and pre-k students today at Tully Elementary School in Louisville about weather today. I covered storm chasing, weather safety, snow, ice, and even demonstrated how a NOAA weather radio works. Best of all, each kid walked out of there with a severe weather safety coloring book and brochure, courtesy of the National Weather Service office in Louisville. Here are some pictures:
It was a lot of fun and I hope they enjoyed watching some of the video I brought in, as well as the talk itself.
Since it looks like we may get a couple inches of snow this weekend, I wanted to pass along an article I found about snow covering LED traffic lights, which Louisville has quite a number of. You can discern if a traffic light is LED or not by looking for a pattern of small dots on each light.
MILWAUKEE – Cities around the country that have installed energy-efficient traffic lights are discovering a hazardous downside: The bulbs don't burn hot enough to melt snow and can become crusted over in a storm — a problem blamed for dozens of accidents and at least one death.
After two weeks of traveling through the Alaskan frontier, I'm back home recovering from such a great trip. I couldn't post on here yesterday because I was so tired from the overnight flight and I'm still trying to overcome the jet lag.
While I was gone, it was pretty cool in the Louisville area. The highest temperature we've had this July was 89 degrees. Not having any 90's in July is very rare and we may even break a record with that if things stay cool through the end of the month.
Looks like the rest of this month will remain below normal according to the Climate Prediction Center's latest forecast:
On to other news... Tom Wills retirement at WAVE TV is coming at the end of July. He will be greatly missed in the Louisville community and I'm sure it will be nice for him to retire after so many years at WAVE. The search for a replacement meteorologist is on at WAVE, especially after posting the position as being available on Raycom's (parent company of WAVE) website:
WAVE 3-TV, the NBC in Louisville Kentucky (DMA 50) is looking for an experienced meteorologist to join our award-winning weather team. We take pride in being the market leader for severe weather coverage with an aggressive team of veterans who know how to showcase technology, own breaking weather coverage, and execute brand in their presentation. Primary shift is for the weekday 2-hour morning and 1-hour Noon newscasts, while also servicing our radio partnerships with live and taped weather updates, and recording weather segments for our digital channels during the scheduled shifts.
It'll be interesting to see who they pick. Broadcast meteorology job openings in Louisville are few and far between, so this is certainly a big opportunity for someone out there!
Louisville feels like an air-conditioned paradise after sweating it out in Manchester, TN for the weekend at the Bonnaroo Music Festival. Temperatures there topped out in the low 90's and the humidity did not help at all. It did rain a bit on Friday, but that only made things feel better for about a day and a half. It was a great festival this year, with performances by B.B. King, Willie Nelson, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, and a whole lot more.
Now, back to our weather back home. The remainder of the week will see highs only topping out in the low 80's with just a tiny chance of rain on Wednesday night. That's quite nice, considering it was blistering hot just a couple of days before I left last week. I might squeeze out a forecast video tomorrow, since I might be spending some time in New Orleans this week. Summer vacation rages on!
Looking for something to do tomorrow night? On the Travel Channel at 10 pm/9c tomorrow night a show called Extreme Tours will be airing and the first segment of the show will feature me and my pals at Storm Chasing Adventure Tours! A crew from the show came out to film and interview us as we chased this past spring in New Mexico and their footage along with clips from my library of tornado video will be airing. This program will showcase what we do as a tour group and how we make it happen. Quite a few of our tour guests and tour guides were interviewed for this and the camera crew that came rode along with us for a few hours. I did a sit-down interview with them along with an extensive round of showing off our vehicles and equipment. This should be a good show tomorrow and I'm certainly looking forward to my first appearance on a non-news national TV program! If you can't make it home in time to watch tomorrow be sure to set your DVR.
