Friday, November 19, 2010

Oh what a night

It was a remarkable night last night with "flat line" temperature conditions persisting at KSLC all night long.  Check out the meteogram, which shows temperatures nearly dropped only a few degrees in the late afternoon and evening and then remained remarkably steady all night long with a lowest 5-min observation of 54 F.


The combination of a thick cirrostratus deck combined with strong winds (sustained at > 15 mph for nearly the entire night) appears to have prevented the formation of any significant surface-based cold pool.  Even still, you don't see too many nights where there isn't a brief lull in the winds to enable a quick trop in temperature of a few degrees. 

3 comments:

  1. There were much lower wind speeds in Utah County last night and early this morning. Many stations there got down to around 40F, so I would say that the wind is playing a much larger role than the cirrostratus deck.

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  2. Do I win the broken rain gauge for biggest low temp bust of the year?

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  3. We've all been there before. An expert is someone who has already made all the mistakes. Besides, I doubt any of us would have done any better.

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