Clouds

Photo by C.G., soon be be C.H.

"Due to the severe weather, this event is temporarily suspended"

Haha, so I started writing a blog post on Friday about the rain we would have this weekend. I was going to write about the potential of this rain causing thunderstorms that would delay the Payson Temple Cultural Celebration held in Provo Utah. Well, I never finished the post because I was working on other projects, and never published a warning. So sorry for not saying anything about the storm on my blog yesterday. But, I do have proof from text messages that I told several people about the possibility of rain during the event.

Needless to say, the event was delayed almost an hour due to the thunderstorm. A look at the daily radar shows at 6:00 a thunderstorm passing approaching Provo. It was accompanied by frequent lightning strikes (mostly cloud to cloud as far as I could tell), and large rain drops.

We should be glad this event wasn't delayed due to tornadoes. There were two in Utah near the four corners...

Anyways, my brothers performed in the celebration, an outside event at Lavell Edwards Stadium celebrating the new temple in Payson (KSL Story). It seems like whenever someone chooses a date for an outdoor event months in advance, they automatically change the course of the weather. Saturday evening was a wet one with 0.86 inches of rain falling in the hour the event was supposed to occur.

By 6:00 PM, when we were walking to the stadium, a large thunderstorm was moving  from the south and was getting bigger. We managed to find refuge in a Wendy's right before the rain started to downpour. Our friends came a little later and weren't so lucky. They were soaked when they met us for dinner. The roads had turned to rivers and people were running around with umbrellas and trash bags over their heads.

The day started out warm and mostly sunny with convection developing over the mountains.

 Later in the day, visible satellite image at 7:30 mountain time shows the explosive growth of thunderstorms...

The 5:00 HRRR sounding analysis at KPVU (Provo Airport) shows increasing CAPE throughout the day due to surface heating and lower level moistening. CAPE is the amount of energy available to raise parcels of air and is indicated by the area of the black hashing on the skew-t diagram. Quickly rising air leads to cloud and thunderstorm formation.

Then just three hours later, after the performance had resumed, the  potential of thunderstorm growth was reduced...

Observations at the Eyring Science Center show the 0.86 inches in one hour and a 25 F degree temperature drop as the storm passed.

After the storm passed there were some beautiful mammatus clouds hanging over the stadium.

It was a smart move of the Celebration leaders to temporarily suspend the event while the storm passed. A lightning strike in a crowded stadium would have been a catastrophe. After the storm safely passed, the show went on. It was a fun celebration and I'm glad those youth had the chance to perform what they had spent months practicing.

In other news, hurricane Blanca will make landfall on the Baja Peninsula...

AMS Letter to Senators and Representatives

Last month the American Meteorological Society sent a letter to policy makers detailing the importance of funding geoscience research. Geosciences is the study of the earth system and includes weather, water, and climate. A link to the full letter can be found here. Here are some of the main points...

Sustained investment in all science is crucial to our societal and economic advancement. In particular, the geosciences contribute to jobs and innovation, create the foundation for our nation’s economic activity, reduce the impacts of natural hazards, support public health, and help us understand the world we live in and our connection to it.

The nation’s economy has prospered, with geosciences research providing our nation with the capability for efficient extraction of natural resources, reliable weather forecasts that enable safe air travel and efficient shipping, and the provision of clean drinking water. Our future depends on continuing this legacy of scientific inquiry and research in the geosciences. For example, improving our skill at seasonal forecasting will help energy companies to plan for and meet consumer demand, farmers to adjust for variations in seasonal rainfall, and cities to prepare for temperature extremes. Furthermore, investments in the geosciences are critical for saving lives and ensuring the safety of our nation. For example, our ability to predict the weather is based on geosciences research. A blizzard in 1888, known as the “Children’s Blizzard,” killed over 200 people because they were caught unawares. In contrast, the late January snowstorm that struck New York and New England with two to three feet of snow, high winds, and surging tides resulted in zero deaths because of the long lead time of the warnings. Similarly, deaths from tornadoes have greatly decreased because of significant improvements in scientific understanding, technology, and infrastructure. 

Steady and sustained geosciences funding will enable improved intensity forecasts of hurricanes threatening coastal regions, development of better strategies for communicating risk and uncertainty in forecasts, a decrease in the false alarm rate for tornados, and better prediction of heavy precipitation events like the one that caused the devastating floods along Colorado’s Front Range in 2013. Improved understanding of climate variability and change will help us avoid negative impacts and take advantage of emerging opportunities.

We urge you to continue our nation’s proud tradition of strong and sustained investments in the geosciences. In return, as scientists, we will continue to devote ourselves to improving the health and wellbeing of our great nation through transparent and meritorious science, advancing our understanding of Earth and our relationship with it.

Ozone Chasers

There weren't any storms to chase yesterday. Instead, we chased ozone pollution!

This summer our research group is involved in the Great Salt Lake Summer Ozone Study. The truck is equipped with and ozone monitor and a GPS.

Ozone Monitor

Truck with inlet tube sticking out the window and GPS on top of the truck.

Yesterday we we drove the truck from Ogden to Antelope Island and then to the international airport with an ozone monitor. We never encountered unhealthy levels of ozone, which is good. But ozone pollution in Salt Lake doesn't usually get to unhealthy levels until July because of it's dependence on sunlight. Later this summer we will be taking more observations. Yesterday's ozone chase was to test a route for the University of Utah Nerdmobile.

Of course, I couldn't leave Antelope Island without a bison selfie...

One of the projects I've worked on is providing HRRR sounding plots available for every hour of every day during the summer. I created this page for viewing these plots. These plots are from the HRRR analysis bufr soundings (downloaded from Penn State) and are created with this skew-T python package.

Back to the 90s

Yesterday was the first day this year we hit 90 degrees. In Spanish Fork we hit a high of 92. Here's a screenshot from my current conditions page from yesterday afternoon...

It was a hot one. We could easily make it to 90 degrees again today if the clouds don't get too thick. Here's the last 24 hour temperature in Spanish Fork. We're currently at 87 in Spanish Fork at 1:50 PM.

Today at work I'm working on processing HRRR data, so here's a screenshot of temperatures (in Celsius) in the western US for June 1st. I've roughly outlined where Utah is at...