Late Spring Doldrums

Haven't posted in awhile, partially due to some mostly uneventful weather recently, and also focusing more on research. There was actually some noteworthy items this week though. An "unexpected" surge of heat came into parts of the Plains and Upper Midwest this week, sending Minneapolis to 97 degrees on Tuesday, May 19th, marking the earliest on record that they have hit a temperature that high. There was a solid front to the north though. In fact, at 5pm that day, temperatures just in Minnesota ranged from 34 up in the northeast to 100 in the southwesern part of the state! Unreal contrast for any time of year but especially in mid to late May! Wednesday was impressive as well. Ashland, WI saw a morning low of 33, yet hit 90 that afternoon. Try dressing for that weather! Or you could have been in Sky Harbor, where the temperature moved from 46 to 86 in 20 minutes, topping out at 88, and then falling back to 45 just 40 minutes after that peak! I would have loved to be outside there during that event. The Lakes are still cool, so when the wind was off the lake, they were stuck in the 40s, but for 90 minutes or so, the wind turned SW and brought in the much, much warmer air that sat just inland... wild stuff, but can happen when you get shallow cold layers like this that quickly mix out.

The craziness in the Upper Midwest is gone, leaving things kinda blah again since the system in the Gulf is just a rainmaker (and was / still is a hefty one in parts of Florida!). Hard to believe the month of may is about over, and we're about to begin meteorological summer as well as the hurricane season! But will the developing el nino (or so it appears to be developing) squash any chance for noteworty extremes in both cases? It could. Most of the best-fit analogs are not hefty in the total number of named storms department, suggesting mostly numbers in the 9-12 storm range. That would not mean a dud of a season though, since it just takes one to make a season memorable. As for the summer, the consensus seems to be for a relatively benign (or near normal) summer for much of eastern U.S, perhaps even below normal in some places, with warmth favored in interior West. We do have to be cautious of the 2002 analog though, which is arguably the best match to what has actually been happening this Spring globally and overall in North America, and that turned out to be a fairly hot summer nationally, so this is not a slam dunk. It does appear the el nino is for real though, perhaps going moderate by fall / next winter.

Incoming!

Haven't posted for awhile, as I figured I'd leave the hurricane talk near the top for a bit, but had to throw this in here today, as we're witnessing one of the more impressive thunderstorm complexes I have seen in quite some time rolling across Missouri and headed into northern Arkansas and western half of Tennessee and Kentucky. These "MCS"s (mesoscale convective systems) are common in the spring when you get impulses in the upper levels interacting with a very warm, moist (and thus unstable) air mass, but this one has been exceptionally strong, with gusts estimated as high as 100 mph when it passed through eastern Kansas this morning. Baseball size hail and a couple of tornadoes have occurred as well in Missouri. Just glancing at radar / satellite imagery, you'd think a hurricane was moving through the region! What is also fascinating is that some of the strongest winds have actually occurred behind the strongest line of thunderstorms, as high as 85 mph as much as 30 minutes after the worst of the thunderstorms has passed! Very wild and impressive stuff! I've seen plenty of damage reports coming in from the affected areas, so hopefully everyone stays safe who is in the path of this over the next few hours.


Here is an image from around 8:00 central time this morning. Wow!