By Brody Klapko in Newsletter — 15 Apr 2023

Keeping it short

In which we experiment with satellite imagery and sing our favorite song.

Corporate wants you to find the difference

A volcano erupted several days ago (I think it was this one) and you can see the ash cloud from space. This isn’t really that unique, but someone asked on the Twitter thread how this would affect the weather and I thought NWS Juneau’s reply was interesting.

Great question! In this case, it is in large part the other way around - the ash cloud itself is being impacted by the overall weather pattern as it gets caught up in the various steering layers and weather systems of the atmosphere as it moves across the Pacific.

5/5

We touched on cyclone Ilsa last time (which ended up hitting category 5). Here’s a loop over a 5 day period if you want to see it in action.

Hotchacha!

We mentioned something related to this last time too, but we’ve got some more high temps. It looks like the oldest record that was broken was from 1938 (Worcester, MA at 79 degrees). The new high was 90 so… not close.

I could have used a longer break

The stormy avocado just doesn’t want to leave this area of the U.S. it seems.

Based on the discussion and a quick check in with Tornado Titans, it looks like hail is the biggest concern. There’s still some risk of tornadoes but certainly not at the level we’ve seen previously.

And while writing the newsletter, hail was confirmed!

Together, we’ll make it through

In my attempt to get away from Twitter as a source for this newsletter, I’m starting to experiment with pulling my own satellite and radar imagery from various sources. I hope you’ll bear with me as I test this stuff out. It’s tricky to get a solid gif while staying under the image size cap for Substack.

Anyway, hello U.S. from space!