thundersnow

[Mike Umscheid]

I was at work last night on the 30th and there were several CGs (not to mention additional in-cloud stuff more than likely) over portions of west-central and central Missouri from, say 04z to 07z. Surface temps underneath were 19 degrees. Wow! The potential instability that was being created and released was around the 650-500mb layer or so right at the nose of the tremendous mid level PV anomaly. In the conceptual-model sense, this is about exactly the location in the compact mid-latitude cyclone where the Minneola, KS tornadoes occurred on 26 October. Very interesting stuff for sure.

 

[Robert Dewey]

I was at work last night on the 30th and there were several CGs (not to mention additional in-cloud stuff more than likely) over portions of west-central and central Missouri from, say 04z to 07z. Surface temps underneath were 19 degrees. Wow! The potential instability that was being created and released was around the 650-500mb layer or so right at the nose of the tremendous mid level PV anomaly. In the conceptual-model sense, this is about exactly the location in the compact mid-latitude cyclone where the Minneola, KS tornadoes occurred on 26 October. Very interesting stuff for sure.

I was thinking about saving some screenshots of the lightning data... I had it overlayed with the WV loop / 500MB heights / MSLP, and you could see the explosive cyclogenesis and comma head development. Quite a few obs were reporting +SN for several hours, which is pretty rare (I usually see SN with a few isolated +SN during "typical" snowstorms across that area).

I must say, the NAM did an excellent job with forecasting the westward extent of this system (the FSL RUC didn't do too bad either). I'll mark this as win number one for the new WRF-NMM. Hopefully it can prove useful through the winter.

 

[Adam Lucio]

Hey Daniel, I hope you were out this past Friday morning! Cause we had thunders snow around here, It was in the early hours of the morning around 6am, its quite a site to see for sure, I wish i had my camera rolling, but alas, I was on my way to work.

 

[Joel Wright]

Does anyone have a map with cumulative strikes for this event available?

 

[Robert Dewey]

Does anyone have a map with cumulative strikes for this event available?

This is one event that I wish I had my GEMPAK system running in "real-time" mode. I was running into so many problems building the latest GEMPAK/McIDAS distribution (on Fedora 1), that I didn't get things going until AFTER the event.

However, I did have access to all available lightning data, which I could have easily put on top of other images (satellite and radar). Unfortunately, I was pre-occupied doing the above and didn't even think about saving the data.

 

[afischer]

Does anyone have a map with cumulative strikes for this event available?

Is this the type of map you are looking for? This is the 12z-12z CG strikes (11/30-12/01)... albeit with an SPC outlook overlaid.

http://www.spc.noaa.gov/exper/archive/events/061130/spcotlk-nav-1.html

 

[Joel Wright]

Is this the type of map you are looking for? This is the 12z-12z CG strikes (11/30-12/01)... albeit with an SPC outlook overlaid.

http://www.spc.noaa.gov/exper/archive/events/061130/spcotlk-nav-1.html

Yeah that works quite well. Thanks!

 

[cdcollura]

TWC Video Clip of Thundersnow!!

Good day all,

I found this little clip of Mr Cantori in Massachusetts nearly getting struck with a thundsersnow bolt (it's later mentioned a car's tires were blown out a few blocks away).

No sound, but interesting expression on Jim's face ;-)