While tropical meteorology is a topic that doesn’t interest me greatly, it’s impact on coastal towns is too huge to avoid. The first hurricane of the season, Alex, is expected to make landfall overnight tonight. The latest 8am advisory places the hurricane in category 1 credentials, with a wind of 79 mph, gusts up to 98 mph, and a central pressure of 959 hPa.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami predicts that this system will reach category 2 strength before making landfall on the Mexican coast between 1 and 3am tomorrow morning. I agree with their thinking, since wind shear is low (between 5 and 10 knots) and high sea surface temps (around 30 degrees C)
While it is scheduled to make landfall in Mexico, parts of Texas will still feel the effects of this storm. More importantly though, the Texas coastline lies within the right front quadrant of the cyclone, so tornadoes are possible for the area. In fact, the Storm Prediction Center has placed the area under a slight risk for today.
NAM models are now up on the forecast page. They look a little funky now, but I will try and make them look better at some point. Here are some things you should know:
- GFS models are every 6 hours over a 84 hour period
- NAM models are every 3 hours over a 60 hour period
- 500mb GFS map is Absolute Vorticity
- 500mb NAM map is Temperature
I hope you enjoy them as much as I will. Any questions or issues with them please let me know.
Also keep an eye out towards the sky, as most of New England is currently under some sort of severe thunderstorm watch:
I don’t use Internet Explorer, because I feel that it is the root of all evil. So over the past few years I have used Mozilla Firefox, and recently I started using Google Chrome (I urge everyone to use chrome, especially if you are still on Windows XP). While it is great, I sometimes forget that most of the people out there use that dreadful piece of garbage Microsoft puts out.
While most of the time it’s not a concern of mine, I started to realize that the theme I was using for this site looked funky in IE 8 and IE 7. It would work fine in other browsers, but for whatever stupid reason the text would be REALLY BIG in IE. After fighting with myself (cause I REALLY liked that theme) I found a theme that should be compatible with all of the browsers.
And with a new theme come some more updates. Changed things around a bit, and added two more cycles to the GFS model runs (out to 84 hours now instead of 72). Why 84 you ask? Well I have decided to create the same parameters for the NAM model as well (so comparisons can be made). And since the NAM only goes out 84 hours, I might as well be consistent.
Look for the NAM models to be out sometime tomorrow. I also have some big news coming within the next few days so stay tuned! 
Today marks two unofficial weather holidays. The first being the summer solstice, also known as the “longest day of the year.” Today is when the sun is out longer than any other day of the year. This is the official first day of the summer, and what a day we are seeing in New England with temps in the 80′s and near clear skies. Good beach weather.
However with summer there is a higher chance of thunderstorm formation, and with thunderstorms is the threat of lightning. While lightning is not the highest weather-induced fatality, it is certainly one that can occur when you least suspect it.
Because of this, the NWS conducts Lightning Safety Week, which is occurring this week from June 20th to the 26th. This website provides a lot of important information about what to do before, during, and after a lightning storm. It is a very good read and I urge everyone to at least take a glance at it.
This site: Struck By Lightning, also provides some good information about lightning safety.
I’m usually behind the times on technology. I’m not one that will go out and buy or download something within its first month of release. It took me forever to get my first iPod, XBOX and iPod Touch, and it even took me a while to start using things like iTunes, GMail, skype, and Google Chrome.
Well one of the things I’ve been starting to do is listening to Podcasts on my iPod. I never realized it until now, but there is a plethora of information out there that can be heard via podcasts. Then I put 2 and 2 together and said, “HEY there must be some kickass weather podcast out there!”
So I started searching for weather podcasts, and after searching through the Weather Channel Accuweather rubbish, I stumbled upon one that was called Weather Brains. I then realized that one of the hosts, James Spaan, had followed me on twitter a few weeks ago. Because of that I started listening to a few episodes, and it turns out that they are really good!
Maybe I’m behind on the times and everyone already knows, but Weather Brains is a really good show for weather nerds to come together and talk about the weather. They have been around for a while, with over 200 episodes! I strongly suggest that you take an hour of your time to listen to these guys. They have informative guests on there and they direct you to a lot of resources you may not know about.
Check out their website here. There you can find out more about the people involved, and even listen to archive shows. Some future guests include people from COMET, famous New England Meteorologist Mish Michaels, and even The Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore.
If I had my stamp of approval stamp around I would issue it for this site
