Weather, Climate, and Other Science Topics
Hi all! Sorry for not writing anything anything this past week, I was vacationing with my folks in Costa Rica! My brother Henry has been teaching English abroad for the past year there, so we jumped at the chance to visit him for a week and haul him back home to Seattle for the holidays […]
Here are the last 5 days of our storm chasing trip from early June. I apologize profusely for not getting these out in a timely fashion! Day 6 (Saturday 6/2/2018) With no storms in the vicinity for the next two days, we decided to take it easy and hang out in Grand Island. As we […]
NOTE: I never got around to finishing this on time, but here it is. This post refers to our storm chasing day on Friday 6/1/2018 It was really nice to have an off day on Thursday, because Friday ended up being an exhausting day. A vigorous shortwave trough centered over the northern Plains drew warm, […]
We knew that the majestic, rotating supercell we saw yesterday (Tuesday 5/29/2018) would be very hard to surpass, but Wednesday ended up far exceeding our expectations. Even as early as the night before, the Storm Prediction Center only had “marginal risk” for severe weather over the Western Oklahoma/NW Texas region. But in the morning, the […]
Tuesday was, without a doubt, the best storm chasing day of our lives. Although we didn’t see a tornado, we saw multiple incredible mesocyclones, which are the rotating updrafts affiliated with all tornadic thunderstorms. Moreover, these mesocyclones occurred within the same thunderstorm complex and were rotating in opposite directions. It was a truly incredible experience […]
Our first day of storm chasing was more of a travel day than anything else, so it was icing on the cake that we were treated to some strong storms and spectacular lightning at night. We all decided to meet in Albuquerque, and although Albuquerque is hardly known for its tornadoes, it ended up being […]
Most people run away from storms. But some people are crazy enough to run towards them. I am one of those people and from today through June 7, I’ll be joined by two others as we go tornado chasing over the Great Plains Storm chasing is unique because it seamlessly reconciles both being a nerd […]
Hi all! I was in Seattle this weekend for yet another fantastic Pacific Northwest Weather Workshop, and I was actually lucky enough to present on some research I had done identifying substantial drops in wind power production at Avangrid! This was my first presentation at any sort of scientific conference (I was on a panel […]
With our record dry summer and the hottest August on record for many places around the Pacific Northwest, we’ve inevitably had an incredibly active fire season and the smokiest summer I can ever remember seeing west of the Cascade Crest. The latest major blaze – the Eagle Creek Fire – came uncomfortably close to home, […]
Our last (sniff sniff) day of storm chasing was significantly more relaxed than Thursday’s, but we still managed to see some well-defined mammatus and asperatus clouds, a giant wall cloud, some very strong straight-line winds, and the most amazing lightning storm I’ve ever seen in my life. Because Friday’s storms were much further south than […]
