October 25, 2010

TV Special On Doppler Radar and AMS Meeting

Two things to mention and then some weather.

Tomorrow night (Tuesday) KIRO TV (channel 7) at 7 PM will broadcast a special titled "Winter's Warning" that will talk about the upcoming La Nina winter and more importantly will tell you about the new coastal radar. They went to Oklahoma to see an operational radar like the one we will get...with the special dual-pol option. In a year, you will all know what "dual pol" is!

And on Wednesday night at 7 PM there sill be a meeting of the Puget Sound Chapter of the American Meteorological Society here is Seattle, where we will hear about where the oil in the Gulf went (see info to the right). Location: NOAA Sand Point (7600 Sand Point Way).

And here is the picture of the day. There was quite a rainshadow in the lee of the Olympics...but it was centered over Seattle and the folks in Sequim got rain! Serves them right.

The reason? The winds approaching the coast in the lower atmosphere were from the west-southwest instead of the more normal southwest or south-southwest, causing the rainshadow to rotate towards us. The rainshadow moves with the large scale wind field.

9 comments:

  1. Really interesting, much thanks, despite 45 years living near the Sequim rainshadow didn't realize "The rainshadow...[can move]with the large scale wind field."

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  2. when is port townsend going to get rain? i was hoping for a weekend event. even squim received rain this go round.

    i want rain!!!!

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  3. "Winter's Warming" ?

    It will be interesting to see how they work that title into the subject...

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  4. I'm about 1.5 miles west of Sequim, and yesterday was mostly dry here. It rained until about 10 am and then again for about a half hour around 4 pm.

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  5. Serves us right alright. You can have your bad air and traffic while we enjoy the shadow. The Shadow knows!

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  6. RE The last big storm -

    Tom Skilling – New record low barometric pressure for October’s been set in Chicago. At 7am this morning, the barometer reading in Chicago fell to 29.02″–eclipsing the old October low pressure record of 29.11″ last reported in Nov 1959–51 years ago.

    The giant storm that has been affecting the Twin Ports and a wide area of the midwest, has produced the lowest barometric pressure ever in Duluth. As of noon on Tuesday the pressure was at 28.39 which easily breaks the old record of 28.48 set in November of 1998.

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  7. I think it's Winter's *Warning* not Warming.

    The typo was confusing to me, too, util I finally found the program listed on Kiro's website:
    http://www.kirotv.com/station/25481899/detail.html

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  8. Cliff, if possible please blog for the rest of us about what you learn at the meeting re: where the Gulf oil went. Thanks!

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  9. Cliff, been watching the radar images for the past few hours (Tues 4-6 PM). Is that a convergence zone that formed east of Tacoma?

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