Monday, September 16

[NorthGeorgiaWX]

Monday, Sept 16
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Good afternoon!

The wife is off doing her book club thing, and I managed to get the website functional again, so I thought I'd take a look at our weather. 

I shared a post where the NWS tried to explain why the forecast didn't work out as planned, and I apologized for what I got wrong as well, but that doesn't make up for the LACK of rain across the north Georgia area. A new drought monitor update will come out Thursday, but the previous map has all north Georgia in a  D1-D4 Moderate level drought, and even a small corner of NW Georgia in a Severe Drought. I've included multiple soil moisture maps that show the extent of the drought at the moment. Parts of North and South Carolina will fortunately get some much needed rainfall from PTC8.

 

Speaking of PTC8, it's currently sitting about 95 miles east of Charleston and moving NNW at a measly 5 mph. There have already been reports of 10-15" of rainfall around the Wilmington area, and with such slow movement, the severe flooding will be devastating.

 

Video of flooding in Wilmington

 

We won't be seeing severe flooding here, and we probably won't see any rain at all this week or next weekend, so the rainfall anomalies continue. Looking at the ensemble probability maps, there is almost a zero percent change of seeing >= 0.1" of rain across almost all of north Georgia. The exception is the east eastern side of the state, where you are closer to the remnants of PTC8/Helene, whatever it ends up being. There you could see some minor amounts of rain, but not anything that will help with the drought. 

 

Over the next 10 days, our temperature should remain fairly close to normal, but probably slowly trending up over time. Depending on the location and orientation of the high that will be setting up to our west, parts of northwest Georgia may be a little bit warmer than everyone else, but still not too far from normal. A wedge may appears again in the Friday timeframe, but shouldn't last too long, as high pressure builds in from the west. But beware, there will be a lot of very warm/hot air around us, and it doesn't take much of a shift in the pattern to change things. Add to that, it's a fairly stagnant pattern to start with, so don't expect a lot changes anytime soon.  Notice in these anomaly images, that we are surrounded by warmth. 

 

We've now dodged two tropical systems this season, will we have a chance with anymore? We're past the peak of the season, and starting on the downward slide, but that doesn't mean that we are out of the woods just yet.

 

All of the tropical forecast that were calling for an extremely active hurricane season, are probably going to fail pretty badly, as we are pretty far from reaching those lofty numbers. But we will be watching a system way down south of Mexico in the western Caribbean that may try to form into something, but we're just too far out in time to know much of anything right now.

 

Really not much to talk about in the near future.

 

 

[Weatherdude]

If this was in January, it would've been something. 

[Preston]

Can we just go ahead and check the GFS into the insane asylum? It is honestly not the most absurd look ever synoptically but I am with WeatherDude, we would be in business if this was January. If this were to play out verbatim, some areas of the Balsams and high elevations of the southern NC mountains could see some flakes.  Can we just state the obvious and say that this has been an ridiculous past couple weeks of weather and not in a good way! 

[Weatherdude]

Larry Cosgrove: Although there have been a lot of warmer than normal temperatures during the JJAS summer time frame, and most of the longer term model guidance (ECMWF and CFS glaringly so) predicts a vast field of warmth, using the analog set and the CanSIPS series argues for some cool intrusions in the second half of November. Resisting the urge to use one parameter (and yes it is a low-end La Nina episode we are moving into...), I am leaning toward a warm West vs. cool East alignment next month that will ultimately turn toward a cold Canada and northern 1/2 of the lower 48 states in late December. That Pacific Basin connection, along with likely retrogression and deepening of the Gulf of Alaska Low into a sub-Aleutian vortex, may yet sabe the U.S. from a completely boring DJFM outlook

[Asperman1]

I saw that the NOAA released the Winter Outlook. Seeing as it is only October, how much confidence/faith should be put in the outlook, and what does it mean?

 

I think I understand, but I am not sure

Edited October 18 by Asperman1