Weather It Is (Weather for the New Year)

Good Morning:

I have received some complaints in the last few days.

So, I must apologise for the following:

1) When I predicted sunny skies and a cloud passed your way.

2) When I predicted a cloud or two, but a drop damped your day.

3) When I predicted 10 inches of snow, but only five fell your way.


And of course, there's dust.

"Very disappointed with your site.  Day after it happened you mention "dust advisory".  Where were you before?  The storm was coming our way week in advance and nobody mentioned it!  What good does this kind of weather reporting does?"

Perhaps it's not my fault?

In last week's parsha (Ki-Tavo), we learned: "But it shall come to pass, if thou will not heaken to the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all his commandments... The Lord shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed."

(Thank you to my oldest daughter for this observation.)

The reader has to keep in mind that there are things we know and things we don't know.  There are things we know we don't know. Then there are also things we don't know we don't know (as Donald Rumsfeld once said).

However, in our case, a better metaphor would be a tree falling in a forest and nobody noticed. We did know, but...

Everytime I issue a blog forecast, I deal with a lot of information.  Over the years, I have worked to synthesize this data in a way that allows me to stay on top of the important weather events.  We produce dust forecast maps.  I can tell you that we correctly forecast that there would be a widespread dust event, and we forecast it in advance.  One just had to look at the dust maps.  Moreover, we correctly forecast that it wouldn't go away "by [last] Wednesday morning," as thought elsewhere.

However, perhaps because of the origin of the dust or perhaps because we haven't had enough time to test this model (that we adapted from elsewhere), it wasn't clear just how high the concentrations would be. They were forecast to be persistent, but the forecast concentrations were less than observed.  So, first off, the forecast dust did not trigger one of my forecast "alarms." Second, it actually didn't occur to me to think about dust with this last heat wave (some call it "storm" -- as it came from a place we never had dust from before) -- so I didn't even look at the maps until I awoke in the morning on Tuesday.  Not thinking to look and not having my warning algorithm tripped by the forecast dust amounts meant that I was left in the dark -- or basically the tree fell and no one noticed.

Of course, one can argue that dust is not weather, but people around here think it's weather and we're going to make a better effort to get it right.

Regarding another complaint:

"What is wrong with your site?

It is predicting thunderstorms every day this week. Not a chance in Hell. It’s over 30 degrees centigrade out, and is very very very rarely rains in Israel in thesummer.

Something is WRONG with your data. It is Not going to rain, much less thunderstorm...

shalom"

Our site shows a chance of thunderstorms in some locations. Actually, the global forecast model also shows a chance of showers in the next few days.   The algorithm that produces these results is based on an analysis of stability factors.  It wasn't designed for here and it needs to be better tuned for here.  Still, there is a short period in the fall when it actually works, and this may be one of them (this is in contrast to our forecasts based purely on forecast cloud rain amounts).

Now that this is out of the way,

Here's our weather:  hot through the Rosh Hashanah holiday.  Not 100 F, but still hot, and while not as hot in the valleys as in the mountains, more humid.  High temperatures will be in the low to mid 30s Celsius just about everywhere, and hotter in the Jordan, Dead Sea Valley, and southern deserts.  In fact, down in the desert area there will persistent dust and a large amount of dust is forecast to advect off the Sinai tomorrow afternoon into Tuesday.  There will also be lighter dust amounts in the northern part of the country, especially the eastern half.

Cooler weather will not arrive until sometime Wednesday.  Rain showers may occur early next week.

La Shana Tova!

Barry Lynn