I am a meteorologist and a former youth leader at church…I have a lot to say on both subjects…and then some
A friend asked if I was just going to talk about the weather for just Michigan, since we are heading that way in less than a week. I responded, that I would cover South Texas and N Michigan, and anywhere there is interest weather. Well, there is interesting weather in both places. Before we get into the details, let’s look at what’s going on now…
Here’s the morning upper level map with the High over Low Rex block, beginning to move onto the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley. The cause of the movement will be the low over the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Northwest. We’ll get to the reason it moves in a little bit. Over the Southern Plains, There is a weak ridge as well.
Over the surface, there is weak high pressure over the Great Lakes, with a weak surface low over the Middle Atlantic States. It’s interesting to note that the stationary front in the Dakotas, lines up with the leading edge of the jet stream that goes north through the Dakotas as well, just like they taught us in meteorology school.
Which leaves us with weak high pressure over the Southern Plains, down to Deep South Texas, which is helping the heat.
So in about 24 hours, the upper level map will look like this. The winds will at 500 mb will accelerate pushing the features along. The Rex block is now for the most part gone, now being replaced with an energetic 500 mb low and jet streak over the Plains. This pattern will kick off Severe weather in the north and keep the heat going down here in South Texas.
Here’s the surface chart from the same time as the upper level chart above it. Weak high pressure over the south with a south flow off of the Gulf. A strong surface low in the Dakotas and a warm front over Michigan.
This may be a little easier to see. By 12z/15 (7am CDT, or 8AM EDT on the 15th), you see the surface low in the Dakotas, and the warm front over Michigan. The cold front is approaching as well. This is the severe weather area (yellow) for tomorrow. The heat area is in the south where the weak front/Low pressure, and high pressure are.
So first the heat…
Here’s the heat index forecast for NWS Corpus Christi’s area (South Texas), with many sites over 105ºF and several over 110ºF. So there is a Heat Advisory out for most of the region through at least Thursday, but is likely to run into next week.
So that leads us to the Great Lakes…
As the warm front moves into the Great Lakes, the Thunderstorms will gain heat and humidity for the fuel. As I pointed out earlier with the forecast for the 500 mb pattern, all of that wind is poised to move into the Upper Great Lakes, and specifically Lake Michigan. While the highest tornado threat is in Wisconsin, there is a significant hail threat (hatched area on the severe hail outlook map) and the likelihood of severe winds (>58 MPH) is medium (33-45% of occurrence within 25 miles of a point).
In the past, I was always alerted when there was a slight risk(2 out of 5 levels with the NWS), but the enhanced risk (3 out of 5), elevates this to concern. Not to mention with Family in Michigan, the concern is higher.
I’ll reevaluate everything tomorrow morning, and decide when I can go live, and watch the thunderstorms across the state.
If you are in Texas, the will be your main concern for most of this next week. Keep hydrated!
Here it is Saturday, I had a bit of day off after doing the live stream Thursday night. That was a wild ride, as I was getting flash backs of working a straight lined wind event in 2015. If you want to see the damage reports or such, go to the NWS Corpus Christi X account or their Web page. Also I shared a lot on my X account, and my Facebook page
So for today, the idea is for a sunny to partly cloudy sky in the lower to mid 80s. The only caveat to this is the spoke of energy that is rotating down, from the north, associated with the upper level low to the east. I was looking at some site specific NBM numbers, and during the afternoon, there is a very low chance (10-20%) of a shower or a thunderstorm to move into the Coastal Bend (Just remember that a 10-20% chance of something means an 80-90% chance that nothing happens.).
The beach weather looks good with that same caveat in mind.
So let’s see what’s causing the weather…
Over South Texas this morning, high pressure continues to build into the Rio Grande Plains, working its way to the east and the Coastal Bend. We will still be getting a north wind with the high to the northeast. The surface low to the east near the Mississippi-Alabama-Florida region of the Gulf Coast, is under the upper level low.
If you see the upper level low is a bit oblong, that lobe to the west of the low center (where the X is) will rotate south. The energy in the lobe can help destabilize things in the afternoon
This is the HRRR model at 21z (4:00 PM CDT). The air is dry, so little is expected for the rain showers, but like I said earlier the chances are low, but not zero.
It’s been an interesting ride, this life of mine. I’ve been obsessed with the weather since about the 2nd grade. I may have thought about other possible paths along the way, but weather has been my main thing. So much so, that I became a meteorologist.
However, I think back on what drove me here. What events that occurred that, kind of, determined my destiny, or purpose? I can think of a few events that started me down this path:
While these events got me going, I have run into others, since I became a meteorologist:
Then as I get ready to enter the last few years of my NWS career, I got two more to add to my list. They both were within roughly 8 months of each other.
As I write this, I’ve had very enjoyable year with the weather. I’m starting to wonder if it’s about time for me to move onto a new phase in my life…
It’s been a while. I have pretty much given up on my Northern Michigan Recreational Weather Blog, and started to blog from here again. A lot of that has to do with WordPress.com charging to embed YouTube videos. Since this is a self-funded blog site, under my wife’s business, I started to do my Coffee and a Weather Map series. However, that has had to be put on hold since the summer, when we moved into a 5th wheel. I haven’t done much with it mainly due to bandwidth issues, and, while in Florida, I lost my Apple Pencil. Since we moved into a cottage south of Gaylord, Our bandwidth, hasn’t improved by much, and now we have power constraint issues. However, on a whole, things have been going well.
However, what first started this post was a comment on the office Facebook page that irked me from a storm that went through the region toward the beginning of the month.
The comment was something along the lines of “with all this technology you’d think we would get better forecasts.”
Blah. My emotional response would have been to sarcastically point out how much better forecasting is since when I got into the business over 30 years ago. I remained calm and moved ahead, ignoring the comment.
I remember being in awe as the NGM (Nest Grid Model) picked up that a wave would produce an east coast storm 48 hours in advance of it hitting anything. Now, we can generally see out 6 or 7 days, although not all the time, and see the possibility of something coming.
That extra time we have now, must be messaged properly so that people will know what to do. However, most of the public can only ask how much snow is going to fall in x city, when there are still lots of uncertainties. We try to message things generally when a system is 5 days out. We try to not get into too much detail since the path track of a storm will change and fluctuate, sometimes by 100s of miles, when within the last 12 hours, the track may be off by 25 miles, and producing more or less snow than was predicted for some locations.
Luckily, we have people who like our work and come to our defense siting their snow fall and the prediction. Over the years, I’ve become accustomed to the generally ignorant comments on social media, but every once in a while…
A lot has happened in the last several months. Mary and I decided to sell our house on the east side of Gaylord back in March. We began to investigate places to live. Turns out that’s when the country was coming to grips with the lack of housing issues. However, we decided to do something radical.
We decided to buy a 5th wheel, and live in it. So, at the end of June we paid off all of our debts, and ended up with new truck (to pull the fifth wheel) and a 5th wheel camper. Other than a major issue with the construction of the camper (see Mary’s Blog here), most of the rest have been minor, or just us “learning the ropes.” This all has caused things to fly by.
So currently we places to live into November. This stresses me a bit, since the reason I got out of contract meteorology work 25 years ago was not always knowing where my next pay check was coming from. Not knowing where we are going to live is a bit of a stressor. However, the fun of living outdoors (I choose not to call it camping) has been great.
Issue that needs to be resolved…a reliable internet connection. Back when we owned a house, Spectrum was an okay ISP, and we had great speeds. Enough speed online that Mary and I could livestream at the same time, with no issues. Well, since we are relying on a 4G hotspot in the camper, We have slower speeds, and we have data caps. Currently, we have 100 GB of data per month. So we make sure that we are only using it for our computers (when I have mine operating), or the AppleTV 4K box that we have used the last 3 years while living in the house on Clearview Lane. There are some other problems with the hot spot box as well, but I’m not going into that. Maybe in a future post.
All that to say, that I’m working on getting back to livestreaming my Coffee and a Weather Map with Jeff series. I’m also planning on working on a vlog, too. I’m going to try and do it easy. A little filming each day, and then getting more done with it as time goes on. I really want to do this, since, we are trying to make a travel channel. I really enjoy what we are doing, even though there is a lot to learn.
I muted myself during the first half of the live stream. Blah. This is the edited version with audio.
The weekend warm up and a weather map, all over a cup of coffee…
