SOLPEX IOP2: Oh what a night!

In the immortal words of Col. John "Hannibal" Smith, "I love it when a plan comes together!" A great event last night with lots of action.  This one should keep us busy for a while.

Overnight the wind-parallel band over the SW corner of the lake dissipated just prior to the 0600 UTC sounding launch.  Then things really got messy with wide spread precipitation, an occasional embedded band, and finally wide-spread coverage that presently appears to be detaching from the lake.



The 1200 UTC KSLC sounding shows we may have lucked out thermodynamically.  Yesterday's 12Z Nam forecast a 500 mb temperature of -25C this morning.  It appears we verified closer to -27.

The MesoWest analysis is quite interesting.  Temperatures cooled overnight across the region.  The lake-land temperature difference remains fairly modest, at least as indicated by the available obs.  The flow in the sounding and at PRP is quite weak. 

I'll dig in more and post anything else interesting in a bit.