Blog Has Moved Locations

My blog is now active...but I have moved it to a more user friendly FB page. You can find my forecasts and thoughts at this address now

http://www.facebook.com/Wxeast

Or you can just visit our Forum

http://www.tnweatherspot.com/

Boring Weather Alert

This Blog is not currently active...and will likely not be updated again until sometime around Hurricane season or Fall. If you are still interestsed in discussing the current weather then there is a link to the right that will get you to our weather forum...where there is active discussions going on :)

Thanks
Toot

Late Season Snowfall North of I-40 Sunday Night

Good Afternoon...After a rough night of severe thunderstorms old man winter could pay one last visit before taking a vacation. A late season clipper system will race into the region sunday and bring clouds and limited moisture. However enough moisture apprears likely for light snow accumulations on the plateau.. the mountains and areas in the valley north of I-40 up into the Tri Cities. Since this snow looks to fall of the night wet accumulations appear likely. Temps sunday night will drop below freezing so hazardous driving conditions will also be possible.

Significant Tornado Outbreak Possible Tomorrow

A vigorous low pressure system will traverse the western midsouth into the great lakes region. This low will probably be very well organized and will likely go sub 990 milibars as the LPS matures. As it starts to move northeastward an associated warm front will move through the area overnight and there could be a few severe storms that fire along this warm front tonight into the early a.m.

IMO this warm front will be the most important equation that will ultimately decide how significant tomorrows threat will be. If the warm front moves through rather quickly then look out... its gonna get nasty. The slower the warm front retreats northward the less significant this threat will be. With a slower moving warm front you will have junk convection trying to stabilize the atmosphere ahead of a very powerful cold front.

There's gonna be severe weather either way but if that warm front and its associated convection moves through the area rather quickly the surface layer airmass will establish a very favorable thermodynamic enviroment where the sun will begin to break through the clouds warming surface temps...then the atmosphere will become VERY unstable due to the high cape/high shear.

If that happens discrete rotating supercells will likely invade middle and east Tennessee transforming into line segments as the cold front nears the spine of the Appalachians. There could also be embedded supercells in these line segments. If things do go downhill tomorrow it looks like the western plateau area would be right in the bullseye and folks in east TN will have to endure a nocturnal Tornado threat which is a whole other creature itself.

There's alot of if's involved in this setup and this event could wind up being either a standard severe weather outbreak or an extreme one... so I would just stay tuned to my local NWS office and its radar.

~ Toot

2012 Severe Weather Outlook

Well...It looks like spring is almost here (even though as I type this there is strong cold advection doing its dirty work outside my window) and its time to try and poke my head into the future to see what spring may hold in terms of severe weather. Ive looked at a few sign and signals and this post will portray if they point to a more normal season which is pretty intense itself here in the southeast...or if the potential for severe weather is above or below normal.

I was gonna do some analogs for this season but since that didnt work out to well for the winter outlook I will stick to the facts here..nothing but the facts.

First lets look at where we are headed in terms of ENSO


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What we see here is us headed out of La Nina and into weak El Nino territory most likely... but during spring we should be near neutral ENSO conditions and that will not hamper severe weather in any way that I can find. The important thing here is that we have two major changes going on with winter transitioning into summer and La Nina transitioning into El Nino.


Next we will look at severe weather trends over the first part of 2012 and compare them to the same time last year in 2011

Here we have the spc reports since the first of January this year..as you can see its been pretty active for what is supposed to be a cold time of the year.



When we look back at last years graph we can see that severe weather was almost nil for this time of year before the active timeframe spike occured.


One can draw several different conclusions from that... but the conclusion I am drawing already is that the Gulf of Mexico is very warm and will be primed by the time our "spike" gets here.


Now speaking of the Gulf of Mexico lets look at the water temps because this is the fuel for severe weather in our area.

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Sure enough they are above normal. The lack of an extended period of colder weather over the southeast has allowed the waters of the gulf of Mexico to stay pretty warm and this is a pretty important signal that says an above normal severe wx season is likely. Now before you get too worked up there are some things that could possibly argue for a more normal or even below normal severe weather season.

The main thing that comes to mind is that the North Atalntic Oscillation has been mostly positive for many months and one could argue that it should be mostly negative this spring and this could offset an above average season to more of a normal type season. A negative NAO would try to suppress a Jet stream thats trying to come north due to seasonal change and could keep the stormtrack right over us or to our south mostly.

After looking at these and several more features I expect an average to above average severe weather season in terms of reports and there will likely be at least one major and widespread severe weather outbreak in the southeastern United States.

Snowstorm set to hit Tennessee

Im too busy to post a wrietup with this so here is my call map...If u have questions...register on our forum if youre not a member and you can read my thoughts there...the link is to the right of this post

Wintry Mess of Ice Sleet Snow and Rain

This is a forecast put together with todays SREF and NAM models..this forecast is highly dependant on the temp profiles of those models. If they are off a hair it could make for big changes in the outcome...this will ultimately be a nowcast situation but it seemed to be a rough one so I thought I would give it a shot

Light snow...sleet and freezing rain accumulations will be possible across most of the state on Monday and Tuesday. Particularly concerned for the East TN valley where I think the most ice accumulations will be possible.

Looking at soundings and mostly SREF data it appears that a mixed bag of weather will move into the state from west to east. With very low dewpoints already in place precip will move into the area as Virga but as the column becomes saturated precip will start to fall in the form of snow.

The snow could fall at impressive rates at times in the western and southern parts of the state. At some point the snow will transition to wintry mix and then to rain over most of the state. I imagine the plateau and mountain regions of the state could pick up several inches of snow in a fairly quick fashion.

The east TN valley poses a unique threat for Ice accumulation in excess of more than .10 inches due to the nature of local topography. After some possible light accumulations of snow the cold air might become trapped in low lying valley areas and freezing temps could stick around for a longer period of time but meanwhile the upper atmosphere temps will warm to above freezing resulting in longer periods of ice accumulations on top of light snow accums. Light Ice accums appear likely for parts of East TN valley