Texas Rainfall (courtesy NWS)

Texas and Louisiana will begin to dry out after a weeks worth of storms dumped more than 10″ of rain in portions of Central Texas and Southern Louisiana. The area of low pressure generating those storms is slowly moving to the Northeast, and the Dallas-Fort Worth area is still getting hit this Monday. Coastal areas are beginning to see a break, but northern Mississippi and Alabama will be the latest victims of this slow moving system before it finally loses steam.

Grey skies across Southern California as a cold front sweeps through. Although beachgoers may not like it, the cooler temperatures are a welcome weather treat this time of year, at a time when wildfires, driven by Santa Ana winds are fed by the hot temperatures in September and October.

It is a quiet Monday across the country, and silent in the tropics as well. We can ease into the workweek.

For a couple of days now, I’ve been meaning to show you an article I saw on Smart Money magazine online. It’s about the fallacy of the 7-day forecast. The author of the article seems to be “revealing” to people that extended forecasts aren’t very good, but I don’t think any forecaster, including the ones he interviews, argues that they are! Television weathercasters give you the 7-day forecast because the computer models go out 10 days. After about three days, the forecast tends toward climatology. But, sometimes, climatology is correct. What I like about this article is the meteorologists give you the limitations of todays forecasting. What I don’t like about the article is the innuendo that weather forecasters “won’t tell you” the limitations of their forecasting, when he has several meteorologists in the interview giving him the “inside information”. Oh, and the Doppler radar does do a good job during a storm of helping the on-air meteorologist forecast the immediate weather event for the next couple of hours. It also helps the forecaster determine whether a storm is severe, and if the public needs to be warned. Here’s the link to the article:

Smart Money on TV Weather

-Dawn Brown

Every National Weather Service Office across the country lists the high temperature, low temperature and rain/precipitation totals for the day after about 5pm. The high temperature of the day is usually reached between 12 and 5pm unless you had a weather event come through that day. I’m going to go through it step-by-step. And, then, I will have an example search to show you how I found the high/low and rain near Houma, Louisiana. FYI… the National Weather Service only has a certain number of weather observation stations across the United States, so you will be finding the climate data of a station near you, most likely not the town where you live.

The first thing you want to do is go to the National Weather Service main site. Here is the link: www.nws.noaa.gov.

Then follow these steps:

1. Type the name of your town and the state in the small box near the upper left hand corner of your screen. (It says Local Forecast by “City,St” above the box. To show you an example, I’m typing in Houma, Louisiana.)
2. Hit the Go tab to the right of the box after entering the name of your town and state.
3. You will be taken to a forecast screen where it will list the current conditions in your town as well as any weather hazards, and the forecast. (This is the page I was linked to for Houma.)
4. This step is very important! You need to find the link that will take you to the local NWS Office near your town.  On the left hand side, just below the NOAA emblem or sign, it will say NWS and the name of the local National Weather Service office. The writing should be in blue. Click on that link.  (If you look at my example page, it says NWS for New Orleans/Baton Rouge, LA.)
5. That will take you to the MAIN PAGE of the National Weather Service office in your region.  (Again, here’s the link to the page in my example: NWS for New Orleans/Baton Rouge, LA)
6. On the left hand column, scroll down to the word Climate, below the word climate, it will say local. Click on the word Local. (Example: It should look like this. )
7. In the middle of the page, you will see a blue bar, with the words Observed Weather Reports.
8. Below this, you find a series of selections.
9. First, select Daily Climate Report.
10. Move over to the next column.
11. Select the National Weather Service Office closest to you.
12. Go to the next or third column. If it’s 7 o’clock at night, and your trying to find the data for today, then you just need to leave “Most Recent” selected and hit Go.
13. If you are trying to find the highs/lows and rain for a previous day, you need to select Archived Data, and select the date you need. Then hit Go.

A new window will open. It should look like the page below:  (The information you want is underlined and in red.)

-Dawn Brown

____________________________________________________________________

These data are preliminary and have not undergone final quality control by the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). Therefore, these data are subject to revision. Final and certified climate data can be accessed at the NCDC – http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov.

Climatological Report (Daily)

000
CDUS44 KLIX 112119
CLINEW

CLIMATE REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW ORLEANS
418 PM CDT FRI SEP 11 2009

...................................

...THE NEW ORLEANS CLIMATE SUMMARY FOR SEPTEMBER 11 2009...
VALID TODAY AS OF 0400 PM LOCAL TIME.

CLIMATE NORMAL PERIOD 1971 TO 2000
CLIMATE RECORD PERIOD 1946 TO 2009

WEATHER ITEM   OBSERVED TIME   RECORD YEAR NORMAL DEPARTURE LAST
                VALUE   (LST)  VALUE       VALUE  FROM      YEAR
                                                  NORMAL
..................................................................
TEMPERATURE (F)
 TODAY
  MAXIMUM         80   1106 AM  98    1980  88     -8       90
  MINIMUM         73    127 PM  57    1969  72      1       75
  AVERAGE         77                        80     -3       83

PRECIPITATION (IN)
  TODAY            2.28          5.64 1998   0.20   2.08     0.32
  MONTH TO DATE    4.30                      2.28   2.02     6.32
  SINCE SEP 1      4.30                      2.28   2.02     6.32
  SINCE JAN 1     41.48                     47.68  -6.20    43.40

SNOWFALL (IN)
  TODAY            0.0
  MONTH TO DATE    0.0
  SINCE SEP 1      0.0
  SINCE JUL 1      0.0
  SNOW DEPTH       0

DEGREE DAYS
 HEATING
  TODAY            0                         0      0        0
  MONTH TO DATE    0                         0      0        0
  SINCE SEP 1      0                         0      0        0
  SINCE JUL 1      0                         0      0        0

 COOLING
  TODAY           12                        15     -3       18
  MONTH TO DATE  176                       172      4      184
  SINCE SEP 1    176                       172      4      184
  SINCE JAN 1   2620                      2259    361     2508
..................................................................

WIND (MPH)
  HIGHEST WIND SPEED    30   HIGHEST WIND DIRECTION    SE (130)
  HIGHEST GUST SPEED    43   HIGHEST GUST DIRECTION    SE (120)
  AVERAGE WIND SPEED     6.9

SKY COVER
  POSSIBLE SUNSHINE  MM
  AVERAGE SKY COVER 0.9

WEATHER CONDITIONS
 THE FOLLOWING WEATHER WAS RECORDED TODAY.
  THUNDERSTORM
  HEAVY RAIN
  RAIN
  LIGHT RAIN
  FOG
  HAZE

RELATIVE HUMIDITY (PERCENT)
 HIGHEST    88           100 AM
 LOWEST     79          1000 AM
 AVERAGE    84

..........................................................

THE NEW ORLEANS CLIMATE NORMALS FOR TOMORROW
                         NORMAL    RECORD    YEAR
 MAXIMUM TEMPERATURE (F)   88        94      1991
 MINIMUM TEMPERATURE (F)   72        57      1969

SUNRISE AND SUNSET
SEPTEMBER 11 2009.....SUNRISE   644 AM CDT   SUNSET   711 PM CDT
SEPTEMBER 12 2009.....SUNRISE   644 AM CDT   SUNSET   710 PM CDT

-  INDICATES NEGATIVE NUMBERS.
R  INDICATES RECORD WAS SET OR TIED.
MM INDICATES DATA IS MISSING.
T  INDICATES TRACE AMOUNT.

Heavy Rain Moving to Texas/Louisiana

The National Hurricane Center has now noted that area in the western Gulf of Mexico with the potential for development. Currently it has a less than 30% chance of development in the next two days. The NHC gives tropical waves and disturbed weather either a low, medium or high chance for development.  Over the next few days it’s going to encounter some high wind shear as it remains stationary in the western Gulf. Both Texas and Louisiana are expected to see some high rainfall numbers even if the showers and thunderstorms remain unorganized.

Just because I’ve tracked down all the links to all the TV stations across the US, let’s take a sneak peek at what folks in Corpus Christiare saying about this area of showers and storms! By the way, the link takes you to the weather page, then look for the box that says video forecast. On this website, scroll down past the 7-day forecast.

If you want to see what the global computer models have to say, follow my link for Tracking Hurricanes.

Talk to you tomorrow… Dawn Brown

P.S… I’m not really following Fred anymore. He’s losing steam, and will decay in the next couple of days. Plus, he’s way the heck out in the Eastern Atlantic!

Looking at the national weather map, Houston, Texas is getting a good soaking today. Click here for the latest video forecast in Houston.

The TV weather guy there also has an analysis of an area of showers and thunderstorms in the Western Gulf that has the possibility of developing. Something to watch, but there’s nothing there yet!

-Dawn Brown

The tropics are quiet, the wildfires in California are no longer threatening homes and about 50% contained, and we are entering what is supposed to be the busiest part of hurricane season. This is a great Labor Day Weekend.

Taking a look at the infrared satellite imagery (courtesy NOAA) off the coast of Africa, there is one area of disturbed weather the National Hurricane Center has deemed 95L, but it doesn’t look to develop. (The forums are active with chatter, so check out MYL Forums to get in on the discussion.) There’s a second tropical wave right on the coast (see the blow up of reds and yellows right near the coastline?). Computer models have this wave developing in the long term outlook, but then turning north in the middle of the Atlantic. As I say this, computer models have huge problems with forecasting not only a storm’s development, but it’s intensity, especially if the storm hasn’t formed a low level circulation.

Meanwhile, take a little time to get to know myweatherlady.com. In the navigation bar above, there is a section about me, my bookmark links (I save my bookmarks at a website called delicious.com. Not all of my web links are there yet, but it will have a complete list of all the weather websites I use eventually.) Just to the right of the bookmarks, I have contact info. Currently, the only way to contact me is through this website or at my email: dawn@myweatherlady.com.

On the left hand side, there is a list of all my blogs organized by categories. Currently, the categories I have are HOME (listing all the blogs), FORECAST TODAY! (to help forecasters who move around the country adjust to their new gig), FORUMS, and TV WEATHER (my blogging about the business of TV Weather, etc.). I want to add a category for KIDS as well as for Freqently Asked Questions. I’m working on those as well as continuing to add links and blogs to the categories I just listed. Below the categories, you will find links to the best hurricane blogs from around the country (My favorites are Jeff Masters from Weather Underground, and Surfline.com forecasters–but all are extremely valuable so you don’t miss something in your forecasting), as well as other weather bloggers below that.

Meanwhile, on the right hand side, you can keep up with me through twitter, check out the latest comments on my website, go visit my t-shirt shop(there’s stuff for kids, pets and people there). Scroll down to the GET YOUR LOCAL TV FORECAST! link. I think this is the COOLEST feature on my website. When you go to this link, you will find a list of all the TV stations across the country listed by state and town. Click on the town you live in or the town you are visiting, and you will find the local weather guy or gal giving the forecast. I love it! Check out David Bernard at the CBS in Miami, Jackie Johnson at KCAL in LA, or Steven Douglas in Fairbanks, Alaska. (I just randomly chose him.)

I will be gone for the next 36 hours on a scuba diving trip, so I will not update on Monday.  To track hurricanes while I’m gone, visit the hurricane blogs, or go to the weblinks I’ve set up under Tracking Hurricanes.

-Dawn Brown

NWS Office San Francisco/Monterey Bay (I use this to check out the weather changes in the last 24 hours, surface pressure very important for forecasting shifts in winds. Wind shifts are not only important for marine forecasts in the Pacific and San Francisco Bay, but for fog forecasting as well.)

Weather Underground Bay Area Weather Sites (This map from Weather Underground shows all the personal weather stations available, much more than the local National Weather Service Office provides. Each station has a record of weather information.)

Unisys Weather Upper Air Models (Place I go to start on my 7-day forecast.)

GFS MOS Guidance (GFS MOS forecast guidance for temperatures around the Bay.)

NAM MOS Guidance (NAM MOS forecast guidance for temperatures.)

Raw FOUS Data (The FOUS… Billy uses this to check out the Relative Humidity at 3 levels, for Low, Mid & Highs clouds & rainfall over 60 hours.)

NWS San Francisco/Monterey Bay Weather Tables (This is a clickable map that will show 7-day model based weather forecast.)

Air Quality (Check the air quality for the day—big concern in the summertime.)

Airport Delays (Check for airport delays, especially San Francisco!)

Rainfall Forecast (Rainfall forecast broken down over 3 days, very fine detail. Billy says it’s a great tool during rainy season.)

California Department of Transportation – Road Conditions (Knowing the actual road conditions, can help you determine if you blew the rain/snow elevation on the roads leading up to Lake Tahoe!)

USGS Earthquake Map (And, of course in California, you will need this earthquake map from the USGS.)

Thanks Billy!

-Dawn Brown, Billy Poon, KPIX Meteorologist

The Magic of TV! Photo Courtesy Chris Meydrich

I’ll get to the picture in just a second. But, first, the job of a TV weather person depends on where you work. Some stations don’t even require that you are a meteorologist. They just want you to be able to communicate the weather forecast in a way that’s easy to understand, so the public knows what the weather will be like when they walk out the door. While the National Weather Service is the government agency in charge of forecasting the weather and issuing warnings when your life or property is threatened, they communicate those warnings through television stations. In places like New Orleans, most television stations require the weather person to have a degree in meteorology. Severe weather, in the form of flash flooding, damaging winds, or hail, can develop rapidly along the Gulf South. When I’m looking at a developing storm on radar, I have the ability to determine whether it has certain features that indicate the possibility of damaging winds, or even a tornado. Because weather conditions change so rapidly, TV weather people often stay up all night watching the weather, in case a thunderstorm becomes severe. (A yoga mat on the floor is very comfortable during an all-nighter.) The other fact that people are surprised about is that we make up our own forecasts. That’s why every station has a different forecast. We check the global computer models four times a day, and adjust our forecasts with the changing weather conditions (what’s going on outside), and what the computer models are showing us as well. It’s up to the experience of the individual meteorologist to look at the developing weather outside as well as use the most accurate computer model to produce the forecast. That’s a lot of mumbo jumbo to say it’s a takes a lot of work and experience to make a daily forecast, and it’s a new challenge every day. (My next blog answers the question: What is a computer weather model, and how do forecasters use them?) Most television meteorologists make their own computer graphics, put on their own makeup, choose their own clothes, and then go on TV! (Not as glamorous as it looks to most people I guess.)

Okay… so to the “green screen”! In the picture above, I am standing in front of the weather wall, (probably putting on my microphone.) When we are giving our forecasts, the screen in back of us is green. Through the magic of TV, the maps of the United States are made to look like they are on the wall behind us, even though they are just projected onto your television set, with the meteorologist in front. When it looks like we are turning toward the wall and pointing, we are actually looking at television monitors on each side of us, and in front of us. Stay tuned for more insider weather info… until next time!

 Looking at the radar and satellite, (if your shop doesn’t have what you need, go to the National Weather Service Eastern Region Headquarters and Aviation Weather) to get a general idea of the weather pattern.

Use your synoptic scale models (large scale models) to get storm placement, flow patterns, and 850 mb temperatures, and precipitation amounts (this is available at Unisys Weather), and make a short-term forecast. Look at atmospheric forecast soundings  site, especially if thunderstorms are expected, to determine severity. Make sure you visit the Storm Prediction Center to see if you are in a risk category for thunderstorms.

Generally, your local NWS office can give you the risk of inland flooding due to repeated storms, but here’s a link to the Hydrometeorological Prediction Center – Inland Flooding in case that is a concern during repeated storm events or a tropical storm has moved inland.

Tides are extremely important for coastal communities, here’s a link to Tide Predictions for Gulf States. Marine and boating forecasters also generally use buoy data. NOAA Buoys Gulf of Mexico

Make an extended 7-day forecast using the latest and most complete suite of extended model runs (e.g. the GFS), available at NCEP Model Analyses and Forecasts.

Also, you’ll need a temperature forecast to compare all of your graphical data against for a highs/lows forecast.  The best place to find MOS (Model Output Statistics) is Current NWS MOS Forecast Products.

When it comes to tropical weather, which can also often be a player, things can get even more interesting, here’s a link to my blog on Tracking Hurricanes.

Oh! One added note, sea fog can develop in the wintertime along the Gulf South. The NWS Office in New Orleans has a decision tree Sea Fog Forecasting to help you forecast a sea fog event in the wintertime. It’s fascinating!

He wanted to be famous when he was young, but for slinging a baseball. “I wanted to be a pitcher,” Gray said.

His baseball dreams stunted by a knee injury, Gray graduated from George Washington University with a degree in geography. He was working on his masters when World War II intervened. Like other meteorologists of his generation, he was trained to forecast weather during the war. Gray was stationed in the middle of the Atlantic on the Azores, an island chain 900 miles off the coast of Portugal, providing forecasts for the Trans-Atlantic flights. At that time, there were no satellites and no computers. “I got a lot of good weather experience.”

At the end of the war, Gray decided to continue his career in meteorology under the tutelage of Dr. Herbert Riehl in Chicago, whom Gray calls the most prominent tropical meteorologist of his time. “The new National Hurricane Research Project had just been formed,” and so in 1958, Riehl and Gray began flying into the center of hurricanes. Dr. Gray wrote his Master/PhD thesis from the flight data gathered during these flights into the center of the storms, describing the internal structure of these storms.

In 1961, Dr. Herbert Riehl moved to Chicago, and offered Gray a job in his department at Colorado State University. Still based far from hurricane country, Gray began spending every summer in Florida, chasing hurricanes. But, there was one big problem. “We would go to Florida every year and wonder was this going to be an active season?”

Dr. Gray states the Atlantic Ocean Basin has the largest year to year variability when it comes to tropical cyclones. “Some years there just weren’t many storms, other years a whole lot of storms and the question is we couldn’t tell before the season. It was completely random.” Gray told me.

In the early part of the 1980s, after Dr. Gray had been flying into storms for 3 decades, he noticed a parallel between two data sets he had collected: the formation of El Nino in the Pacific Ocean and the lack of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic Ocean Basin. During an El Nino year, there would be less tropical cyclone activity in the Atlantic Ocean. The term El Nino refers to the periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America. For years, it’s mainly been the bane of the Western United States, because it can lead to flooding rains and mudslides. But, in the Atlantic, it leads to wind shear, and wind shear is bad for hurricanes. (Wind shear is a change in wind direction or speed with height.)

When Dr. Gray made the discovery back in the 1980s, it didn’t receive much attention because there weren’t very many storms. But in the last 15 years, the Southeastern United States has been hit by one devastating storm after another. And populations across the Eastern United States and Gulf of Mexico began waiting for his predictions and whether it spelled another active year, or a relatively quiet season. Nowadays, most of his research is done by Dr. Phil Klotzbach, the main author on the seasonal outlooks. Their research and outlook forecasts are much more complicated, based on worldwide weather patterns, and ocean temperatures around the globe.

And, he’s got competition. Forecasters at North Carolina State, the Weather Research Center in Houston, and European forecasters all put out a seasonal hurricane forecast, among others.

However, the official hurricane outlook published by NOAA at the beginning of hurricane season still most resembles the forecast parameters discovered by Dr. Gray.

Forecasting in the Northeast can be overwhelming, especially if you start in the middle of winter! You could be dealing with lake effect snow, ice storms, sleet, freezing rain and blizzards! Here are some of the best web links to get your forecast off the computer and on the air.

After looking at the radar and satellite, (if your shop doesn’t have what you need, go to the National Weather Service Eastern Region Headquarters and Aviation Weather), follow these steps to make a forecast:

Take a look at Unisys Weather at your synoptic scale models to get storm placement, flow patterns, and 850 mb temperatures (this is available at Unisys Weather). Unisys also has the local Skew-T’s, but forecast soundings are also available here.

After you’ve figured out what’s going on in the larger scale, you can get down to the more nitty-gritty mesoscale (especially for lake-effect and even rain/snow lines).  What I typically use for this is a tool called BUFKIT which is available at Buffalo, NY National Weather Service for download along with the required data sets.

Also, especially good for lake-effect snow, is the MM5 model, which is available at SUNY Stony Brook MM5 Mesoscale Forecasts.

To wrap this up and get a good idea of the next 7 days of weather, a good standby for the latest and most complete suite of extended model runs (e.g. the GFS) is NCEP Model Analyses and Forecasts.

Of course, you’ll also need a temperature forecast to compare all of your graphical data against for a highs/lows forecast.  The best place to find MOS (Model Output Statistics) is Current NWS MOS Forecast Products.

If you’d like to learn more about forecasting lake-effect snow or other winter weather phenomena, check out this website MetEd Home Page and become a member.

Another great option is to check out Haby Hints, developed by meteorologist Jeff Haby from Mississippi State University. You can go to his website and search for pretty much any weather term, and get an easy explanation of how to predict and forecast weather.

Happy forecasting!