7 am

For those of you who have been following,  you remember I spent a good amount of time talking about “Not Storms”. Yesterday was the perfect picture of confusion, nobody really picked up on what was going on until it was over. People have already told me the storm went south etc. etc. No, it didn’t. The truth is it is going to but has not yet. So here is “The Storm”.

Current US Surface map, the low pressure is circled in yellow.

So what was yesterday? A couple of things, mostly the jet-induced precipitation. All sorts of mini disturbances can travel along the jet undetected until they show. They are not really predictable until after they appear. Yesterday, as I looked at the surface maps I noted a couple of anomalies that I saved for future reference. First, keep in mind surface maps update every 3 hours, and similar to models, they take a while to be available, so the 8 am surface map is usually available at about 10 am. So here was the 8 am for yesterday  I circled a shortwave trough in red.

Then the 11 am surface map.

Once that disturbance passed completely through the area, things slowed down considerably. So the embedded disturbance was our (Not) Storm.

Since I started writing this the latest (5 am) surface map is out.

Look another shortwave. No, I don’t expect this to affect us. But it shows you how unpredictable storms can be.