1/14 - 10pm - All Sorts of Interesting Weather Today!

Henderson County, TN

The Wind Advisory that was in place for southwestern portions of Tennessee today was canceled at noon because wind speeds across the region were falling just below the 25 mph necessary. Nevertheless it was quite breezy and today's high in Jackson got up to 54 degrees, well above what was expected. Some clouds from the Alberta Clipper system (explained below) did make it into the region and I even managed to find some mammatus clouds, which are pictured on the right, in Henderson County, TN this morning. You usually find these underneath a springtime thunderstorm, but in this instance I think they may have been caused by snow hitting the layer of dry air in place underneath the clouds. Aside from the oddities of today's weather, the new week looks warm until Tuesday when showers and storms will give way to another cold snap and again another gradual warm up. Check out my forecast on WBBJ this morning (my first one in 2012!) below for more details:

What is an Alberta Clipper? Put simply it's a fast-moving area of low pressure that dives southward from the area near Alberta, Canada in the wintertime and spreads light snow to the Midwestern states. This particular Clipper was an interesting one because it centered its maximum snowfall in a very small area as the storm moved through Kentucky and Tennessee. More specifically, this area was just south of Louisville from Harrison County, Indiana to just south of Lexington, KY. Accumulations vary widely in Louisville because of the scattered nature of the snow bands that moved through, but they seem to range between a half inch to around two inches. South of town there are reports of more than three inches around Bardstown and Taylorsville! NWS Louisville's forecast graphic from earlier this evening points out pretty well where the most snow has fallen and you can tell exactly where the heavy snow band sat this afternoon. I drove through this band near Radcliff, KY on my way from Jackson, TN to Louisville and I can verify that it was indeed very heavy as indicated on the map. I took a quick video of today's snow at my house in Southeast Louisville just as I got home for my long weekend:

5/23 - 11:45pm CDT - Bust Today in Nebraska

Things didn't go so well in Nebraska today. We stayed along the warm front in Southwest Nebraska/Northwest Kansas where east winds, building instability, and decent shear was, but things fell apart before they could even get started. The main reason for this was the low in Colorado unexpectedly moving westward just before storm initiation. This turned our east winds into south winds and threw our shear into the garbage. Storms that initiated moved south to north with little to no rotation and tended to pulse instead of slowly build up strength. There were a few reports of tornadoes in Northwest Kansas this evening, but they were generally weak and most likely caused by outflow boundary convergence and micro rotational factors instead of large scale shear. We threw in the towel around 8pm this evening when the storms all weakened considerably, but we managed to see a nice sunset and a few mammatus clouds under the anvil of a storm to our north. The shot on the left is from our live stream this evening... that's me taking a picture of the mammatus clouds.

Looks like we'll be in South or North Dakota tomorrow as a low travels from Colorado to South Dakota. The latest NAM computer model run indicates east winds along the ND/SD border tomorrow afternoon with good shear, dew points near 70, and EHI values of 3 or more. I certainly think that tomorrow will have more potential than today, but we'll know for sure by tomorrow morning. For now, the SPC has placed North Dakota and South Dakota under a 30% Slight Risk of severe weather for tomorrow. There's talk that they may upgrade to a Moderate Risk tomorrow morning, so we'll see how that pans out!