Thursday, August 3, 2017

Quote of the day.

Yesterday, as part of my waking-up ritual, I turned on NOAA Weather Radio to get my daily morning update.  Within seconds, I burst out laughing.  I thought I must have mis-understood what I heard.  But, a second time around I heard the same thing.  from the Hazardous Weather Outlook came this statement:  Some Thunderstorms may produce lightning.

Your tax dollars at work.

And, speaking of our tax dollars…is it just me, or do others believe that our “official” forecasts have been pretty bad this summer?  I know as well as anyone about the frustrations of forecasting convective systems.  But, we’ve been bombarded with forecasts of “rainageddon”, severe storms and chaos several times with nothing to show for it.  In fact, the biggest rain we’ve had recently (July 23) was barely given any attention.  That situation was fun to watch while it unfolded – the NWS changed/updated their forecast 4-5 times over about 8 hours AND the only one that was correct came out about 3 hours after the rain ended!    NOTE:  The NWS had another case of “the cat chasing its tail” a few days back when they issued a spurious heavy thunderstorm forecast about three hours after the threat had ended.

El Nino/La Nina outlook

Most of the first half of the year, NOAA’s long term climate forecast model, Cfsv2, was predicting a climb  back into mild El Nino conditions for late fall and winter.  Over the past couple of months, the model has done a flip.  Now, it’s forecasting a mild La Nina to develop.

The consequences/forecast for North America has also flipped -early forecasts indicated a below normal temperature for our winter.  Now, they are strongly indicating a very mild winter.

And, by the way… the current NWS forecast for tomorrow is just plain not going to happen.  No way.  We have about a 30% chance for showers around 8-10 A.M.  Nothing close to the “numerous showers and thunderstorms” in the forecast.