Friday, September 19, 2014

That Was Largely a Bummer

Yesterday was a depressing day to be a meteorologist, with nothing but "cumulus patheticus" developing along the Wasatch Front and all the excitement to our northwest.

KMTX radar loop for 0000–0202 UTC 19 Sep (1800–2002 MDT 18 Sep) 
The storms shown above developed near a surface trough that was draped across the Intermountain West.  I thought something would bubble up ahead of that trough, but alas, it wasn't to be.  Even the strong outflow boundary that you can see pushing southeastward across the Great Salt Lake in the loop above couldn't get anything going.  What a pity.  The storms above did produce some severe weather, with 1-inch hail reported in Caribou, ID yesterday afternoon.  Mother Nature just seems to have Idaho's number this year.

On the other hand, we did have a nice rumbler move through the Salt Lake Valley early this morning and park over the Avenues.  It doesn't look like much on the radar, but the thunder was pretty regular and disturbed my sleep enough to make me grumpy this morning.

KMTX radar loop for 0939–1119 UTC (0339–0519 MDT) 19 Sep
The lightning map below provides a nice summary of yesterday and last night with a large number of strikes running from northeast Nevada to southeast Idaho and just some scattered stuff along the central and southern Wasatch Front.

Source: www.lightningmaps.org

2 comments:

  1. I hate it when 1" "hair" falls from the sky. I must go along with raining cats & dogs.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Painful typo! I just fixed it. Hair is now hail...

      Delete