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4Warn Weather BLOG |
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March 2008
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February 2008 ArchivesPredicting the future is no easy task but, let's face it, that's basically the duty of a meteorologist. When we create our forecasts, we do so with the understanding that a small change in the short-term weather could result in larger misses down the road in our extended forecast. We saw evidence of that over the weekend. If you were watching our forecasts late last week to get a sense for your weekend weather, you probably noticed t...
Thanks to our friends at the National Weather Service for putting together this detailed map of storm totals from our several waves of sleet, freezing rain and some snow. Once again the area South of St. Louis including Potosi, Farmington and over to Sparta, Illinois saw the highest amounts of sleet and free... Round 5ish anyway, I've lost count. I hate that groundhog. A Winter Storm Warning remains in effect through 6pm FRIDAY evening. There won't be precipitation the whole time, but several distinct rounds. The northern reaches of the viewing area will lean more toward a snow event. The southern reaches will lean more toward freezing rain. The majority of our viewing area including the entire St. Louis Metro area will see slee... I intended to blog this morning about tonight's total lunar eclipse, but hard-working Kristen Cornett beat me to the punch. Her posting from Tuesday does a great job of breaking down the astronomical event, so check out her entry just below this one. I do have one addition to make. Kristen's blog entry mentions tonight's events at the McDonnell Planetarium in Forest Park, but we've been made aware of another eclipse-related event. A... A Total Lunar Eclipse will occur Wednesday night. This will be the last until 2010. It occurs only at Full Moon as the entire moon moves through the earth's shadow. You won't need any special viewing equipment, just look up. As of now I expect partly to mostly cloudy skies that night. Hopefully the clouds will hold off until after the eclipse. From start to finish the eclipse will last 3 hours and 26 minutes.
A few people at the station were asking the question, "If we're getting so much ice South of St. Louis, why aren't there more power outages?" Kent and I addressed that on the evening shows Monday night and even did a brief explainer of how sleet forms. But I'll go into a bit more detail here. To answer the question above, keep in mind that sleet and freezing rain are both ice. But they form in different ways. It's freezing ra... Unlike our last 2 big winter weather events which were all snow, this one will be more of a mix. That makes the forecast very difficult. Generally, an inch of rain converts to about 10 inches of snow. Once you start adding sleet and freezing rain into the equation with different ratios, the numbers get a lot harder to get a handle on. If you miss the timing or temperature by just a very tiny bit, it can make a large difference in the fore... February 5th of 2008 will be remembered as a dark day in weather history across middle-America and the South. The death toll from an outbreak of strong tornadoes is already in the mid 50s, and may continue to rise in the coming days. This is a map from the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) showing reports of severe weather across the country from Tuesday, February 5. In the past ten days we've had 3 days with severe storm warnings, an 8" snow storm, 2 days with highs in the 70s and 3 days with highs near 30. It's been a wild ride and if you caught our forecast tonight, we don't have any major storms in the next 5 days, though we do have a high of 50 Friday and then a low of 12 by Sunday morning. So what's causing this extreme weather? There are so many variables involved in daily and weekly wea... Well that's 2 significant snow storms so far this season and I'm feeling pretty good about our forecasts. The metro-east was hardest hit this time around as the Super Predictor indicated on Thursday. The timing worked out well as the storm was winding down by early Friday morning. Matt and Steve did a great job handling the duties on Friday morning. Those guys are the best. I've been doing this for almost as long as those two have bee... |
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