Warm Gulf Stream Temps Could Impact The Rest of the Winter! (credit: NWS Wilmington, North Carolina)2/20/2017  DISCUSSION: Earlier in the day on Monday, forecasters working at the National Weather Service office located in Wilmington, North Carolina created the graphic attached above. As you will note in the graphic above, there have been incredibly sea-surface temperatures paralleling along the East Coast of the United States. As the 2016-2017 Winter season continues, this could make for some potentially interesting forecast scenarios depending on how the rest of the Winter season evolves. To be more specific, as low pressure systems occasionally develop along or near the Gulf Coast or East Coast of the United States, they will occasionally move up the East Coast.
As these systems track along or close to the East Coast of the United States, under the right circumstances, they can sometimes deepen just offshore into what are referred to as Nor'easters. Moreover, the strongest Nor'easters often develop as a result of there being a stronger baroclinic zone (which is a straight-line distance over which there is a horizontal temperature gradient). Thus, with the warmer sea-surface temperatures associated with the Gulf Stream just offshore from the East Coast of the United States, this makes for a much more interesting situation as we move through the rest of this current Winter season. It is also worth noting that this is the warmest mid-February water temp since at least the year 2004 in Wrightsville Beach, NC. Frying Pan Shoals buoy water temp is in the top 10% of all mid-February observations. Sufficed to say that these are particularly warm sea-surface temperatures just offshore from the coastline of North Carolina and other surrounding states. To learn more about other interesting educational topics in meteorology, be sure to click here! ©2017 Meteorologist Jordan Rabinowitz
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 DISCUSSION: As discussed above in the guest lecture which was recently delivered by GWCC contributor/consultant and Meteorologist Sheldon Kusselson, here is a neat video lecture covering the incoming moisture advection coming into the state of California! This is certainly a neat watch for any hydrologists, residents living across the state of California, and more. It is worth noting that this is a relatively serious situation based on the recent heavy rainfall which has impacted these drought-stricken parts of California! Be sure to watch the entire discussion above to learn more about this important upcoming flooding threat and more!
To learn more about other high-impact flooding events from around the world, be sure to click here! ©2017 Meteorologist Sheldon Kusselson Gorgeous Kelvin-Helmholtz Waves over the English Channel! (credit: Samphire Hoe via Meteo Europe)2/17/2017  DISCUSSION: During the late afternoon hours on Thursday across coastal sections of western Europe and specifically towards the British Isles, there was a particularly interesting weather pattern in place. This weather pattern was characterized by a substantial amount of vertical wind shear in place between the surface and much higher up in the atmosphere. Although wind shear is most often associated with being a factor and catalyst of severe thunderstorms developing rotation and sometimes helping such storms to generate a tornado, wind shear in this part of the world often has other consequences.
In addition to winds sometimes being found to change direction with height, there are also situations in which winds will not change direction with increasing height. In these alternative scenarios, the winds will instead be found have different speeds at different levels of the atmosphere (while still maintaining the same direction of flow). It is in these situations that we most often find visual manifestations of this change in wind speed with increasing height within or near a given cloud deck. This is a direct consequence of this unidirectional flow at different or even slightly different heights causing clouds to "spiral" around themselves and be observed as "Kelvin-Helmholtz" waves. To provide some background on the history behind Kelvin-Helmholtz waves, it is important acknowledge that this atmospheric cloud phenomena was named in honor of Lord William Thompson Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz who collectively studied the atmospheric dynamics behind this picturesque atmospheric phenomena. To learn more about other neat educational topics across the world of meteorology, be sure to click here! ©2017 Meteorologist Jordan Rabinowitz On Sat., Feb. 4, 2017, I gave a talk to the Friends of Bonita Beach. The talk centered on “Celebrating The Weather.” I decided to use cloud photography to focus the talk on the sky. As part of the talk, I shared some cloud photography of things familiar to us. One image was a happy dog (ground perspective)… To read the full story, click here - http://www.weatherworks.com/lifelong-learning-blog/?p=1244 © 2017 H. Michael Mogil  |
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