The Seahawks/49ers Game!

1:11 p.m.

First off, let me apologize for my hiatus in blog posts. I’ve finally settled down into my new place, and I love it. My roommates are spectacularly good people, and I’m having a ball here. I’ve still got a little organizing to do yet, but I’m getting close. School starts in ten days though, and I’m definitely not ready for that.

Today will feature one of the biggest games of the entire 2013 NFL season – a brawl between the 49ers and Seahawks at Quest Field. I can’t remember a regular-season game in which the stakes have been higher. These teams are arguably the two best in the NFL, and they are in the same division. And Kaepernick and Wilson are two of the best quarterbacks in the game today. If you plan to ask any favors of me today, do so after the game. I’ll even stay glued to the screen during commercials so that I have no chance of missing any football action.

One of the many things I love about football is that it is played in all kinds of weather. There are none of those wimpy “rain-outs” like they have in baseball. Of course, stopping a baseball game if moisture arrives is generally a good idea considering that the vast majority of the game is dependent on how the hitter reacts to a 90 mph fastball inches from his body, so there is that factor. I can only recall a football game being stopped due to weather once, and that was during a Thursday night game at Quest Field on December 14, 2006 as a rain band of record-breaking intensity swept through the area and flooded the field.

I may be regarded as a weather god among some of my friends who’ve been graced by my providential snowfall forecasts, but the truth is that I honestly pretty illiterate when it comes to technical meteorological language. The NWS forecast discussion this afternoon was pretty hard for me to comprehend, but here’s what I gathered. We’ve got a low pressure center in the upper levels of the troposphere approaching the Oregon coast right now, and the flow to the north of the circulation into Western Washington is unstable (large change in temperature with height) and diffluent (air diverges, making it easier for less dense air near the surface to rise and create convective showers). We’ve got a stubborn marine layer from a big onshore push last night that hasn’t gone away, so surface heating won’t be much of a factor. However, as the evening goes on, the layer will break down as instability increases. As the upper-level low becomes closer, a “vorticity maximum” – the center of a vorticity field – will go through the area, providing additional lift and instability. As the vorticity values decrease, the atmosphere will stabilize, and showers will come to an end. “Vorticity” refers to the tendency of an air parcel to spin and is the adjective form of “vortex.”

The radar picture above shows a line of showers poised to strike the Seattle area and continue northward through Western Washington. There are some even heavier showers offshore… some containing lightning and hail. These showers are moving north. The shower activity currently comes to an end to the south of a NW-SE line band of showers, so it would seem as though our shower activity would end soon. The NWS is calling for additional showers this evening though, and who am I to claim superiority over people who do this stuff for a living?

Regardless, there is nothing I’d love to see more than Kaepernick get sacked by a sudden gust of wind with one of these storms. Go Hawks!

~Charlie