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I got you a gif

A quick note about weather models. Weather models are tools and they aren’t perfect. We’ve talked about this a little bit before and it’s one of the reasons we need meteorologists to interpret them.

Please do not take my sharing these models and maps as any kind of forecast or anything like that. My intent is to introduce them to you so they make a little more sense.

With that out of the way, here’s a 2m temperature anomaly map. It takes the forecasted temperatures (2 meters above the ground) and compares them to a long term mean. It then shows how above or below the mean the forecasted temperatures are. So the blues and greens are below that mean, and oranges and reds are above (the scale at the bottom is in degrees fahrenheit). You can also see the timestamp for the forecast in the top right.

In other words, you can sort of think of this map as showing how much hotter or colder than average it’s going to be.

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Found over on YouTube. My quick notes/highlights:

• With the warmer temps we had over the weekend and coming up later this week, the snowpack is melting. There’s sort of more regional and localized flooding currently but increasing flood risk seems probable.
• If we have a moderate to strong El Niño, we could see another wet winter next year. It has been a while since we’ve had back to back wet winters (plenty of back to back dry winters though).

And here are some recent articles related to the snowmelt if you want to read more: LA Times article, SF Chronicle article.

I’m just a link in your chain

Here are a few links covering the tornadoes last week:

• Storm chasing footage
• An absolutely stellar shot of a supercell
• MyRadar video, which includes an explanation of the Fujiwhara Effect (something we got to talk about before)

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Do yourself a favor

And google “aurora borealis”. There’s a video below if you’re feeling lazy though. Some really incredible views recently!

Happy belated Earth Day!

To celebrate, here’s a link to a climate dashboard and a gif of this most excellent planet.

There’s an app for that

We’ve talked about weather apps a little bit before and the What Next: TBD podcast covered them recently. Daniel Swain is the primary interviewee, and he talks about the data sources for a lot of the weather apps out there, and how forecast models work.

I think there are some companies out there trying to build weather apps that do a better job of combining model data with scientific analysis, but I don’t think we’re there yet. Pretty excited for the day when we are though!

See you next time

Here are some photos from the weekend to close things out. And here’s a bonus video of some mountain lions (click the video in the link to make it bigger) we saw on our game camera recently!