Ramblings of a Graduate Student

This morning I gave a short weather briefing at the National Severe Weather Workshop.  The image above is one of the graphics that I showed.  Not a lot of active weather, however portions or northern Kansas and southern Nebraska did have thunderstorms this evening.  It won’t be long until this blog is discussing various severe thunderstorm threats.

Tomorrow I hope to discuss the late weekend / early week storm.  A lot of heavy rain across portions of the central United States is looking like an almost sure bet.

Above is this morning (12 UTC; 6 AM CST) surface pressure chart, as analyzed the by the Storm Prediction Center’s surface objective analysis dataset. (Essentially, what this means is that this is a model generated field that is “tugged” back toward truth through the use of observations.)  A couple of things stand out 1) the very strong low pressure centered over the New York City, NY area and 2) the strong high pressure located over the central Rocky Mountains.  The brown dashed lines indicate “troughs” or low pressure, or areas of lower pressure that are not completely closed off.  You’ll notice a trough to the northwest of the strong northeast surface low (this is indicative of strong warm aid advection aloft).  There is also a trough in the southern plains.  This trough is associated with a small, but potent, mid-level shortwave trough / closed low that brought rain (and some snow) to central Oklahoma over night.