Spring Downpour and Waiting for a Train

FrontRunner trains were delayed yesterday afternoon. There were lots of people waiting in the rain at Murray Station.

Finally, the train came. Standing room only.

Murray Station at the red star

The storm was moving southeast. While skies to the east were dark, the skies in the near west were clear and sunny! This neat picture of the hospital shows the sunny reflection in the windows with the dark skies in the background.

The Mountain Meteorology Lab camera captured a nice rainbow.

Salt Lake City Dust, April 22, 2015

Strong winds on April 22, 2015 stirred up a lot of blowing dust this afternoon and evening. 

PM 2.5 concentration

Air Temperature

Wind Speed/Direction

Spring at the U

SpaceX lands Falcon 9 on drone ship

This is an incredible accomplishment...modern space exploration at its finest!
This technology will considerably decrease the cost of sending objects to earths orbit. what thus means for the weather community is that those millions of dollars saved can be invested in satellite technology.

Bad Lake Size

MDL is the National Weather Service Meteorological Development Laboratory and has developed a unified terrain data set that is used in weather forecast issued by NWS. As I understand, the unified terrain data set was upgraded, but the size of the Great Salt Lake was blown up! The lake really isn't that big. This is bad because a large lake effects the weather around Salt Lake in a variety of ways. We've seen a large lake impacts the amount of CAPE near the Great Salt Lake. This could mean the models are more likely to incorrectly forecast thunderstorms. Also, a large lake would effect  forecasted lake breezes and possibly lake effect precipitation. Hopefully this issue will be fixed soon.

ASTER is the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) launched on the Terra satellite in 1999. All the data is now available for free. Data viewers and downloaders I like are http://glovis.usgs.gov/ and http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/.

Here's an awesome image of Utah County from September 17, 2014.