GOM Water Temperatures

[Bob Hartig]

The question inevitably comes up each year: What is the tornado season going to be like?

I am pleased to say, definitively, that I don't have a clue.

But I do have some hope that it may offer a few more chase opportunities than last year. Oh, yeah, there's that drought thing that really put the kibosh on setups last year after April 14, and it doesn't show any sign of letup. Without any evaporative boost from moist earth or vegetation, dewpoints are apt to be trim out west. That's no news to anyone.

But I have noticed that water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico are above normal, and the ENSO maps forecast them to remain so. To my thinking, that suggests a better moisture fetch than last year's generally anemic return flow. Maybe the Midwest will benefit most from it, and I for one won't weep if there are some decent setups in Illinois. But it seems to me that it offers a ray of hope for Tornado Alley.

This differs slightly from my earlier gut hunch, which has been that, like last year, this year's chase season will start early and die young due to the drought.

Not being either a climatologist or a meteorologist, I'm not going to say more. I'm just putting this topic out on the table because it seems to me that it's worth looking at. It's mid-winter and there's not much else to talk about, but meteorological spring is just around the corner. May the Gulf be good to us in 2013.

 

[Jeff Duda]

Bob, do you have links to those SSTs and forecasts you mentioned?

 

[Bob Hartig]

You bet, Jeff. I should've provided that information in my original post.

First, here is the link to the ENSO updates that got me curious. Go to the 27th page (they're not numbered) for forecast maps for oceanic water temperatures. You'll probably want to enlarge them. They're rough depictions of where and by how much surface water temps are expected to deviate from the norm. You can see that average Gulf water temps for the periods shown range from 0.5 to 1.0 above normal on the scale, and I'm guessing those numbers are degrees Celsius (the scale doesn't specify).

Then check out this table by the NODC for the western GOM. (You'll also find a sidebar link for the eastern GOM.) It gives average monthly temperatures as well as recent temperatures for various buoy locations.

I weigh that information against recent (i.e. January 29) CPC drought maps, which don't paint the rosiest of pictures for most of the Great Plains but look good farther east and in the northern plains.

 

[Tim Carley]

Good news is that short term drought conditions cant be much worse than 2012 and actually do look a little better. Just a little.

 

[Jeff Duda]

I usually use the National Data Buoy Center (www.ndbc.noaa.gov) for observations (but not analyses) of SSTs.

 

[Bob Hartig]

I usually use the National Data Buoy Center (www.ndbc.noaa.gov) for observations (but not analyses) of SSTs.

Yeah, that's normally the one I use too. But I wanted to find something that didn't just give me recent data, but also average SSTs, so I could get an idea of how current temps compared with the norm.