Why Are Clouds White? June 30, 2007

Well, summer has arrived, and a typical afternoon will feature beautiful structures high in the sky. Towering upright storms that sit and dump heavy amounts of rainfall are pretty common for this time of year, but what makes them so white and pure looking?
Clouds are made up of water droplets. Water droplets tend [...]

FRIDAY’S FOLLY June 29, 2007

Whatever happened to the cow that was lifted into the air by the tornado?Udder disaster!What did the one tornado say to the other?Let’s twist again like we did last summer.What did the thermometer say to the other thermometer?You make my temperature rise.What happens when fog lifts in California?UCLA!What’s the difference between a horse and the [...]

VENUS AND SATURN June 29, 2007

Venus and Saturn will be just a full moon and a half, width-wise, apart this Sunday. This neat astronomical occurrence will be viewable to the naked eye for about two hours after sunset. Look to the west just after the sun sets and Venus, providing we’re not clouded over, will be readily visible, shining bright [...]

HOT AND COLD June 29, 2007

Vostok, Antarctica holds the world record for the lowest recorded temperature. On July 21, 1983 the temperature fell to an unprecedented -89.4 C or -129 F!
The world’s highest official temperature is 136 F recorded at El Azizia, Libya, on September 13, 1922.

PLENTY OF MOISTURE! June 28, 2007

With the exception of a little dry layer here or there, this mornings Springfield MO is nearly saturated from the surface up to the tropopause. Springfield is on the warm side of a stationary boundary as are we. Daytime heating is all ready starting to “pepper” the warm sector with showers and t-storms. There [...]

Heavy Rainfall Potential June 27, 2007

Tonight we’ll be watching a surface boundary that will sit tight across eastern Oklahoma and northwest Arkansas. This boundary will provide the focus for showers and storms that will likely train over the same area. Several embedded waves of low pressure at 500 mb will move over the stationary boundary creating the potential for heavy [...]

HAIL TO THE SUMMER OF 2004 June 27, 2007

Drew’s blog entry prompted me to do some meteorological digging in the dregs of archived data and thankfully I didn’t have to go back that far to find a year that was “relatively” cool. Back in school, as part of the course work for Climatology, we had to collect and analyze over one hundred [...]

This Just In…..No 100 degree Heat! June 27, 2007

It can be challenging at times to go on television and repeat the same story. Usually during the summer we’re repeating “hazy, hot, and humid” over, and over, and over again; however, this summer, we may never see 100 degrees with the green vegetation, and the abundance of gulf moisture.

Evapotranspiration is a big [...]

THIS DAY IN WEATHER June 27, 2007

1994 The temperature reached 122 degrees at the Waste Isolation Treatment Plant east of Carlsbad, NM to set the state high temperature record for New Mexico. In Oklahoma, the temperature at the mesonet station near Tipton reached 120 degrees, setting an all-time record for the Sooner State! (NCDC)

MILD & SHOWERY June 26, 2007

The map displays forecasted rain totals by 00z Saturday. Disclaimer: Forecasting rainfall totals that are largely a product of convection or t-storms is a difficult undertaking for both machines (computer model) and humans. With that being said, we could and will very likely have some spots within our area that will be [...]