I guess I should keep closer tabs on my blog. It always seems to happen that I get so distracted by school, the blog becomes the last thing on my mind.
Just to update the weather synopsis for the plains, and midwest, and east coast: Around a week ago, we were all blessed with an early taste of spring. But, as most weather in March, it was short lived. Right now, we are dealing with a Greenland Block, or so it seems like that. Although the AO really hasn't trended quite as negative as we have seen over the winter, it certainly has trended down towards neutral/0. The NAO has trended negative, but if we wanted to try and forecast using teleconnections, there seems to be a trend in this block letting up a bit. While this is occurring, there is a rather strong High Pressure sitting near Hudson Bay in Canada. This is also leading to ENE flow, which is keeping the weather rather cold for this time of the year. This all adds up to the potential for an early week snowstorm somewhere in the midwest. Fortunately, there are also a few factors which are really important when it comes to snow this time of the year. Given that the ground temperatures have been at or above freezing for a better part of a month or longer, and the sun's inclination angle is increasing every day for the Northern Hemisphere; timing would be very critical in determining whether accumulating snow would occur for much of Northern Illinois. With this increased energy, daytime temperatures are likely to not be conducive of heavy snow accumulation. Given this, snow would need to occur overnight to accumulate in large quantities.
As for severe weather: We actually have had a few mini outbreaks, but because the quality of moisture has not been good, the severe weather has been rather minuscule. It is a tad too early to get good moisture transport northward; but as we saw on this past Tuesday, it doesn't take much moisture to ignite something. This past Tuesday, we had a modest shortwave set up in E Nebraska. There was a trailing cold front, and warm front setup across Southern Iowa. The one main concern with this system was the moisture, and the cloud cover. Early morning cloud cover, is ok, but if it continues to last into the day, much of the possible instability is wasted. Luckily, during the mid morning, a portion of drier air had infiltrated an area in NE Kansas into SW Iowa as well as SE Nebraska. This drier air was due to the dry line that had setup. Unfortunate, the winds were veering into the dry line, which really eliminated any sort of activity in that area. So, that left the Warm Front. In the vicinity of the warm front, the Wind Shear was maximized, and there was sufficient instability and moisture to initiate storms in E Nebraska (near Omaha). There were several tornado reports in the area of Omaha, and the threat continued into Iowa where some clearing in Southern Iowa had helped destabilize the environment. With the Warm Front pushing a little north (around Des Moines), there was also a slight increase in moisture. Storms continued to fire across SW Iowa, and really were rooted there due to the Warm Front. Several pictures of the storm structure, as well as my radar feed; showed some shallow supercells, with great rotation due to that presence of the Warm Front and the Wind Shear associated with it. The storms went much more Linear as they approached Des Moines, although they still had embedded supercells with abundant rotation. As that line headed eastward, it quickly weakened due to the cold air it encountered at the surface. Other than this outbreak, and a few other small ones; its been a little quiet. And, don't expect it to get any better with the current pattern.
That should cover it for now. And I'll do my best to pop in every now and then.
