Weather It Is (An afternoon note. A Storm Ahead?)

Good Morning:

An afternoon note: the winds are blowing so fast (with gusts > 60 km/h) that I feared my hair would blow off.  The late arrival of the rain is allowing for dust to persist in central areas and south. The dust will continue to blanket these areas until the arrival of the rain later this afternoon and its eventual progression southward into the Arava tonight.

Barry Lynn

High dust levels and heavy rain have occurred across the country.  The heavy rain will move south during the day reaching the center in the afternoon or evening.  However, rain is forecast before that.

Today's heavy rain has been initially focused in the north.  This is a miss by yesterday's models, which predicted the heavy rain over night in the center. The rain was actually forecast to occur as a result of a moisture streamer, and (apparently) the location of this streamer was misforecast.

Near Gale Force winds are occurring and will last until later this evening.

The rain is forecast to taper to showers tomorrow morning and then our attention turns to a massive build up of cold air over Europe. It's so big that one might argue that we'll be along the southern edge of the northern Jet Stream.

An area of upper level energy rotating around this storm is forecast to slide southward and then dig-out a strong and unusually large trough over the eastern Mediterranean.  At the same time, a ridge of higher pressure over Africa will expand northward helping to amplify the trough.

One might argue that this is an unusually large amplitude system with a unusually large wave-length.  Perhaps it is a consequence of all the energy added to the atmosphere from the very strong El-Nino these past few months.

The GFS ensemble (GEFS) has shown this feature off and on within some of its members over the last few days.  Today, the probability is up to about 30%, but the timing is very unclear.  If the atmosphere evolves as shown, it will be ideal for a major snow storm for the center of the country (on cold northwesterly winds).

Will it happen?  To be objective, 70% of the ensemble members do not show this event. On the other hand, the GFS, which is a higher resolution model than its ensemble, shows something very unusual -- perhaps too large a "Tsunami" wave to miss.

Shabbat Shalom,

Barry Lynn