Weather Blog #12

SATURDAY

Today we have 100% cloud cover-cirrostratus clouds. Our atmosphere is extremely stable so I wouldn’t count on having any storms today. We are getting winds from the west/northwest at about 10 mph and there is a low-pressure system sitting on top of us. You can see the winds correlate with the low-pressure system-as they are shifting in a counter clockwise direction around our area.

The storm from yesterday is continuing to move eastward and is hitting the east coast today. I wonder if it is still carrying the same intensity that it was yesterday.

FRIDAY

While today was pretty boring weather-wise in the Midwest, there was some crazy weather going on elsewhere in the country so I’m going to talk about that!

Today while I was at work I heard on the radio that there were horrible tornadoes popping up from the south all the way up through the Midwest. The main states it affected was Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and southern Illinois. I was curious to see some maps and charts of this type of weather, so today I looked up yesterday’s information and this is what I found:

You can see that there is a low-pressure system moving through the south. It is set up just like it was when we got our bad storm a few days ago-it has a cold front off the southwest and a warm front to the east of it.

If you look at the stability chart for Tennessee you can see that yesterday Friday morning it was completely unstable. This means that it will be a lot more likely to see severe weather because the atmosphere is so unstable. As the storm passed, you can see that it starts to shift and the atmosphere is on the verge of becoming condionally unstable, which is better, and soon I’m sure it will become stable again.

The stability chart for Illinois shows that it has a pretty stable atmosphere; however, I heard that an entire town was wiped out by tornadoes. I am curious to see what a stability chart would look like in that area-I’m guessing it was not the same area where this data was collected.

THURSDAY

We had 100% cloud cover today. There were light winds coming from the northwest. The atmosphere is very stable-you can see this because the yellow line on the stability chart remains to the left of the two white lines for the majority of the chart.

Overall there are a lot of low-pressure systems & much cloud cover of the united states. This leads me to believe that there will be some more precipitation and possibly bad weather in the next couple of days.

WEDNESDAY

In the morning there was 100% cloud cover and throughout the day we had light flurries and rain. Winds were coming from the east as the Low pressure system passed us, and eventually shifted by the end of the day and they were coming from the north/northwest. Here is a map of the storm on wednesday morning-you can see there is an acluded front attached to the Low pressure system now which means that it is dying out.

By late afternoon the clouds were clearing and the snow storm, with less intensity than initially expected, had passed. Here are two pictures I took of the clouds this afternoon. The first picture shows some Altocumulus Undulatus and the second picture shows what looks to be Stratocumulus Undulatus.