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Northeast Severe/Convective/Thunder thread V


Typhoon Tip

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I sort of like how the quasi-linear stuff is falling apart on either side of the supercell... Hoping that as it becomes fully discrete it's able to sustain for a bit as it heads for the MA border, despite the diminishing thermodynamics.

Nah... this time of day I'd rather see a big line being driven by a cold pool. This discrete cell has fail all over it.

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Nah... this time of day I'd rather see a big line being driven by a cold pool. This discrete cell has fail all over it.

I've given up on anything significant holding together down here...(not that I ever thought it was likely BTW). I'm cheering for one more cycle up before it gusts out in the next half hour or so. A discrete supercell with even the slightest hint of rotation is almost always more interesting to me than all but the strongest lines.

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There is an absolute pig of a cell way out east of Gloucester right now. 70 dBZ over 25 kft, probably producing baseballs in the Gulf of Maine.

Look at the size of the 65+ dBZ core.

Was actually just going to post something about that thing. Isn't it wild?

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Witnessed a well defined rain free base/mesocyclone just N of Lawrence from 495 at 845pm.  

No question about it.  A bit of scud rising up into the center of the base for a short time, but no

rotation evident.  Got rain wrapped quickly. No real wind at my location.  Drove S on 495

and directly into the core.  A few pea sized hailstones occurred in the +TSHRA at 903pm.  Lightning

was not that frequent, but what CGs occurred were quite vivid and intense.  A few very bright bolt

channel "retina burners".

It was too dark for any still pix, but tried to stop to take some quick video of the base.   No luck...495

as it turns N into Lawrence is elevated relative to the surrounding area, so getting off the highway with the

trees, forget it!

NW flow tstms here rarely disappoint, even w/o an EML.  Don't say that to CoastalWx…he is still

not satisfied! :) 

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Insane night at the Hatch Shell on the Esplanade. Radarscope on my phone was informing about 50 people around me. Was watching the cell moving southeast from NH. Looked to be a very close call, but seemed like it would just miss east of the hundreds of thousands at the esplanade. At around 9:30 they announced a mandatory evacuation instructing people to move to the Storrow drive tunnel or the Hynes convention ctr. Most people were not budging even though national guard troops were yelling at them. Then around 10:00 when it was obvious te cell would miss / was shredding apart, they announced fireworks were on and welcomed people back.

Wild night. And really demonstrated poor planning... A true emergency would have been a disaster (stampedes, people jumping into the water, not to mention the risks from lightning). It was a very tough call, and they were lucky that cell shredded eastward.

The evacuation, far from orderly as reported here:

http://boston.cbslocal.com/2012/07/04/esplanade-evacuated-due-to-severe-storms/#.T_UZoOrStdc.mailto

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Several sig severe reports from BTV area. Not sure why the SPC has been downplaying this all day. They are so bizarre sometimes.

It is a difficult area to forecast for. Severe up this way obviously is nothing like the Plains, and likewise typical Plains forecasting methods don't always apply. Usually we are good for at least a few SVRs just as long as we get sufficient CAPE. Once we reach about 1500 J/kg, I'm thinking we'll issue at least one or two warnings. It wasn't a classic looking sounding by any means, but it had ingredients in place once that warm nose was erased.

I also think sometimes New England suffers from the prioritization of various threats across the country. SPC rightfully should focus their focus where the greatest chances for significant severe will be. Today for example, the entire country began the 6z SWODY1 with no more than a "see text", but it was clear the greatest conditional threat existed across MN (which is why they got the first paragraph in the write up). By 13z, storms were still ongoing near DTX, so a conditional slight risk was added, in addition to MN, so New England has no slipped back to the third most important area to watch. 1630z, and the slight risk was expanded even further along the ring of fire, so we definitely suffered from a prioritization of resources.

From our end, we understood what the SPC was thinking, and we already had enhanced wording in the forecast beginning with at least the midnight shift last night. Including us in a slight risk did really change our forecast any, but maybe might have provided some better graphic opportunities for the TV mets. That speaks to your "outsourcing" comment. As long as we have it in our forecast, and don't blindly accept "see text" as a throw away thunderstorm day, we'll do fine on getting the word out.

The only part of the day that left us scratching our heads I guess was the flash flood threat. We issued a couple warnings, and had reports of up to a couple inches of rain in 20 minutes, but had no reports of flooding. Pretty impressive to have no water issues with that kind of rainfall rate.

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Wow check out the scenes on the Haze Cam from the top of UVM in Burlington as the storm rolled in from the northwest.

Great shelf structure there. No wonder that it produced so much wind when you see how low those clouds are to the ground. Don't have to to mix down very far to hit the surface.

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It is a difficult area to forecast for. Severe up this way obviously is nothing like the Plains, and likewise typical Plains forecasting methods don't always apply. Usually we are good for at least a few SVRs just as long as we get sufficient CAPE. Once we reach about 1500 J/kg, I'm thinking we'll issue at least one or two warnings. It wasn't a classic looking sounding by any means, but it had ingredients in place once that warm nose was erased.

I also think sometimes New England suffers from the prioritization of various threats across the country. SPC rightfully should focus their focus where the greatest chances for significant severe will be. Today for example, the entire country began the 6z SWODY1 with no more than a "see text", but it was clear the greatest conditional threat existed across MN (which is why they got the first paragraph in the write up). By 13z, storms were still ongoing near DTX, so a conditional slight risk was added, in addition to MN, so New England has no slipped back to the third most important area to watch. 1630z, and the slight risk was expanded even further along the ring of fire, so we definitely suffered from a prioritization of resources.

From our end, we understood what the SPC was thinking, and we already had enhanced wording in the forecast beginning with at least the midnight shift last night. Including us in a slight risk did really change our forecast any, but maybe might have provided some better graphic opportunities for the TV mets. That speaks to your "outsourcing" comment. As long as we have it in our forecast, and don't blindly accept "see text" as a throw away thunderstorm day, we'll do fine on getting the word out.

The only part of the day that left us scratching our heads I guess was the flash flood threat. We issued a couple warnings, and had reports of up to a couple inches of rain in 20 minutes, but had no reports of flooding. Pretty impressive to have no water issues with that kind of rainfall rate.

Yeah all good points. I guess sometimes I'm just perplexed that occasionally you see a relatively minor threat that they throw a slight risk up no problem and other times a fairly decent looking threat you're lucky to get a see text.

I use the SPC discussions as just another piece of information when making a forecast. Unfortunately the vast majority of TV weather people just outsource all their convective forecasting to the folks in Norman.

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Yeah all good points. I guess sometimes I'm just perplexed that occasionally you see a relatively minor threat that they throw a slight risk up no problem and other times a fairly decent looking threat you're lucky to get a see text.

I use the SPC discussions as just another piece of information when making a forecast. Unfortunately the vast majority of TV weather people just outsource all their convective forecasting to the folks in Norman.

One thing I will say though that does annoy me around here is that it seems like BOX and OKX in their densely populated CWAs can verify any severe thunderstorm warning with the most minor tree damage. We've sent crews to places where "trees are down" only to find a dead limb dangling from a power line. I think it probably leads to "overwarning" marginal storms.

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I was at my lake house on the northwest side of Lake Winnisquam in Meredith, NH last night, when the cells came through. On the drive from our house to Exit 20 on 93, we counted 11 trees down and other countless examples of damage. Definitely an intense storm!

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Can't look at bufkit b/c I'm on my phone at work on a bus heading to bowling but looking at the NCEP NAM convective forecasting page lapse rates look awful

There are some exceptionally low dewpoints/moisture (925-850mb) being advected in from the ridge axis in the Great Lakes Friday into the Northeast Saturday. If this is true, Saturday will not be quite as exciting as it could have been and attention may shift to Sunday, at least down my way.

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There are some exceptionally low dewpoints/moisture (925-850mb) being advected in from the ridge axis in the Great Lakes Friday into the Northeast Saturday. If this is true, Saturday will not be quite as exciting as it could have been and attention may shift to Sunday, at least down my way.

Agreed.

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After leaving the Johnsons Pond fireworks, the ride home we saw the real ones, The video doesn’t do it justice, Soon as we got on rt 3 in Coventry you could see the light in the sky, once we got on 95 S (Exit 6)it was amazing. Iphones couldn’t capture it but the Contour did pretty well. Looking at the radar this thunderhead was over the tip of long island/block island. The video is pretty much from Weaver Hill Rd overpass south to exit 5 rt 102.

7/4/2012 10:15

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Agreed.

I wonder, with the late day moisture advection, lowering surface pressures and s/w moving in, if we can muster up an evening MCS threat from southern New England to PA / NJ. The slower evolution of this weekend may just change the character of the convection.

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Great shelf structure there. No wonder that it produced so much wind when you see how low those clouds are to the ground. Don't have to to mix down very far to hit the surface.

Yeah that thing had a pretty good path of legit damage last night.

I also like how the ASOS was right in it's path and could verify the winds. Not often a first order site gets hit with sustained wind over 40mph and gusts to 65mph.

And a couple other automated stations on or near the lakeshore were clocking 50-65kt gusts....so that's not like some guy looking out his window and guessing a high wind speed.

Friends in Burlington said that was absolutely wild with 1" rain in 21 minutes, getting blown sideways by 60+mph winds amid constant ground shaking lightning. Was described to me as one of those storms that is fun at first then gets so rough that you actually start to get concerned about watching it and not hiding in a closet haha.

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After leaving the Johnsons Pond fireworks, the ride home we saw the real ones, The video doesn’t do it justice, Soon as we got on rt 3 in Coventry you could see the light in the sky, once we got on 95 S (Exit 6)it was amazing. Iphones couldn’t capture it but the Contour did pretty well. Looking at the radar this thunderhead was over the tip of long island/block island. The video is pretty much from Weaver Hill Rd overpass south to exit 5 rt 102.

7/4/2012 10:15

Is that Rt 4?

<-URI alum

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