Heat burst bonanza

[Tim Vasquez]

I just observed a heat burst a few minutes ago at our house about 15 miles east of Norman. This started about 10:40 pm with some gusts out of the southeast. The temperature maxed out at 85.0 deg F at 10:51 to 11:01 pm before slowly falling.

Looks like the Norman mesonet got pinged a bit too:
http://www.mesonet.org/data/public/mesonet/meteograms/NRMN.met.gif
at about 10:30 pm, reaching about 84 or so with dewpoints falling off precipitously.

Radar during the event (winds had died down by this time):

Sounding 4 hours ago (warm temperatures from earlier daytime high of 86F):

Surface mesonet:

I wonder why this pattern is so particularly conducive to heatbursts... I hear they happened last night near Waurika.

Tim

 

[Rob Satkus]

I kept waiting for the good winds here in south Norman, but nothing exciting. Certainly could feel the warmup as well as the drier air. This beats a tornado any day.

Rob

 

[Adam Wolff]

Three nights in a row with recorded heat bursts...quite the treat!

Looks like Shawnee recorded an 88 degree reading just downstream from Tim. Freedom experienced a heat burst closer to Waurika's early Sat. morning. The Mesonet site recorded a 91.4 degree temp. and 38.9 degree dew point reading shortly after 4am. Wish I could have experienced either event.

 

[Karen Trammell]

I wonder why this pattern is so particularly conducive to heatbursts... I hear they happened last night near Waurika.

Tim

I did my M.S. research on heat bursts... June and July are actually prime time for heat bursts to happen due to a couple of things:

- It's MCS season, and
- It's getting hot.

Heat bursts happen with dissipating high based convection after the nocturnal inversion has begin to develop. The thermodynamics were perfect for heat bursts last week because there was a good, dry EML up to a high cloud base - especially on Norman's heat burst evening. This just accelerates the parcels descending from the dissipating convection and helps erode the nocturnal inversion, resulting in the rapid warming and drying.

Heat bursts are really cool (no pun intended!), and quite interesting - although I don't necessarily agree with Rob's comment! Haha!