Thursday, April 26, 2012

Thar She Blows

As is often the case over the Intermountain West, we're seeing a nice surface frontal boundary develop during the day over eastern Nevada and southern Idaho.  Although a front was largely indistinguishable this morning, note the clear wind shift and contrast in temperature that currently exists from the southern Snake River Plain to near Elko Nevada.


Frontal passage at Jerome, Idaho was quite apparent in the meteogram as temperatures were climbing in the pre-frontal environment, but dropped abruptly with frontal passage.


I suspect we'll see further frontal strengthening (in terms of the abruptness of the temperature contrast) over the next few hours.

Kudos to MesoWest for collecting and integrating surface observations from all over the western United States.  They are indispensable for frontal analysis!

3 comments:

  1. i might be crazy here, but can you tell me how youre getting that many weather stations' data on mesowest? i seem to be limited to the SLC area, though i know the site can be finnicky

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    1. Look on the left. There should be an option for "network." Change that to all networks.

      There are also tabs at the top for Region/zone and radius. Set radius to 200 or 300. If you create a user account, you can get the maximum. Click on the map and it will center on that spot and grab the stations within that radius.

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    2. thanks for the tip, the region was my problem. rookie move.

      p.s. that frontal passage just rolled through with a vengeance!

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