With temperatures in New England in the 90′s over the past few days (and 100′s in some places) , we are officially in a heat wave…..
….and it sucks
A lot of people complain about weather, but for me I only complain about one thing: The Heat. I cannot stand it. I currently have no Air Conditioner, so I dread going home to this stagnant heat.
My theory is this: when it’s cold, you can put on as many layers as you need (just like this guy):
BUT in heat such as this, you can only take so much off before you can get arrested.
The funny thing is, I complain about the heat, yet I end up in the south for work. First it was Oklahoma, then Florida, and now it’s North Carolina. Maybe this is a calling to create an Air Conditioned dome for the city of Asheville:
Happy 4th of July Eve…Eve………Eve everybody! Either way we are halfway through the year of 2010. Wow is all I have to say.
The first of July tells me that I only have 29 days until my new job starts. Yup, that’s right, I got a job offer a few weeks ago and have officially accepted it. I will be working with the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites, which is located in downtown Asheville, North Carolina (same building where NCDC is located). It’s going to be a new adventure for me, as I will be permanently moving to western North Carolina. While I am excited, I am also sad to leave my friends and family behind.
On another topic, I have created a BETA version of the RUC map room. Take a look at it here and let me know what you think. My next step is to try and mix and match different displays, as the only map that is different is the RUC SBCAPE.
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! 
