Chris ☈ozoff
@agitatedcu
Cannot jump high, highly motivated by clouds, vector enthusiast, fan of wilderness. Erie, CO
I know GFS is notorious for getting too enthusiastic about 2-m temperatures during heat waves at distant leads, but even so, has it previously forecast 121°F in SD during some of its earlier infamous scorchers? Either way, I don't like the temperature outlook for the next few weeks for the plains.
For example, the 10 largest CO fires are all recent, and well tied with the very strong warming signal in Colorado and occurred, not surprisingly, during hotter/drier years with crappier snowpack.
AQIs expressed as "cigarettes per day". I am not sure how good the conversion is, and there are some reasons to believe that heavy exposure to the kinds of AQIs being observed up that way is even worse than smoking those many cigarettes (esp. while exercising), but it still puts it into perspective.
Looking back at May, this scene from western Kansas remains one of the most awe-inspiring skies I witnessed.
About 1-2 minutes on a climate-centric Facebook feed that I didn't ask for gives me multiple bingos on my denial bingo card.
Not a great ECMWF forecast for the historical wildfire situation in the Southwest US.
This photo was taken from the epicenter of the Cottonwood Fire. It's on the road up to the Tushers range (from Beaver).
Here's an alpine scene from the Tushers (from their trail races that go up Delano Peak).
Our new paper on predicting probabilities of 24-h periods of rapid intensification out to 120-h leads from the GEFS is now out. journals.ametsoc.org/view/journal... An example of its prediction for Helene (2024) is included below. Grey regions in the first figure show 24-h periods of observed RI.
A challenging day of whack a mole in northeast KS where we picked new storms to south and missed a couple or so obtainable tornadoes. We were right next to Wakefield but it was heavily rain wrapped tornado.
Turkey tower in Grand Island. The day’s about to explode into action.
A subsequent shelf after another junkier supercell cut off its unstable inflow.