Wednesday Afternoon Full Post

>> Wednesday, June 21, 2006

The 1pm observations are showing that most places in the area are already in the lower 90s. The forecast for mid 90s looks good. An isolated storm is possible, but most places still look to stay dry.

Air quality is a problem today with Code Orange days for both the Charlotte and Raleigh areas. Be aware of that and take steps to help out with the air quality situation.

Interesting to watch the weather up around Raleigh. This morning it looked like the coverage of storms up that way would be isolated at best, but it appears the outflow boundary from overnight storms up in The Ohio Valley sparked the showers and storms up there. Check out the visible satellite imagery by clicking below.

http://weather.cod.edu/satellite/1km/Carolinas/Carolinas12.gif

The heat will remain with us tomorrow and Friday. Scattered showers and storms will be possible Friday, with an increasing coverage of showers and storms Saturday and Sunday. The heat will back down as the chances for showers and storms increases. Look for mainly 80s for highs Saturday through Wednesday.

Everything still looks good for numerous showers and storms Monday through Wednesday around here. Here is a look at the 12z GFS for 8pm Tuesday.



A frontal boundary looks to stall just west of here, and that will provide us with very good chances for showers and storms during that time period. If all goes well, we could see some good drought relief from this set-up...keep your fingers crossed.

Tropics...

Still watching the area northeast of the Bahamas. The chances for significant development of that system are somewhat small, but it bears watching. Regardless, I think the most likely scenario is the system gells with the frontal boundary mentioned above and enhances the rainfall across the southeast. This could wind up being a flooding situation somewhere over the southeast, and we will watch it closely.

Time to eat some lunch. Everybody stay cool today...




3 comments:

Anonymous 4:44 PM  

Newbie weather question.

If I understand correctly, outflow from a thunderstorm is basically cold air left over from a thunderstorm.

Seeing how those storms blew up in eastern NC, it almost looked like a mini-cold front passing through.

Is that a good way to think of an outflow boundary? Basically cold air aloft similar to a cold front, that in today's case allowed the warm unstable air to rise?

Thanks!

Matthew East 8:43 PM  

You are right on. A good way to think of outflow boundaries is a "miniature" cold front. When thunderstorms form, they cool the air inside of them. Eventually, they collapse, and that cooler air rushes out from the thunderstorm. The leading edge of that cooler air is an outflow boundary.

Outflow boundaries are often times the triggering mechanism for summertime thunderstorms. There are often no large storm systems or frontal boundaries to initiate storms, so many times outflow boundaries do the trick, like today.

Anonymous 8:47 PM  

Thanks for the reply Matthew! I love your blog, and Jeff's. Very kind of you both to give a view behind the camera, and to help others learn.

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