Here’s a look at a typical meteogram that our team uses to forecast temperatures. Each line represents a computer model. The green line is the NWS forecast and the black dots are the observed values from today.
You can see the opportunity of a 56° afternoon one model gives us for Sunday afternoon. Also of note, the only two models that go out to Thanksgiving are pointing toward high temperatures in the low 30s! Yikes!
Posted under cold blast, weather
This post was written by Eric Sorensen on November 20, 2009
I love sharing cool pictures, so I have some more to share. This is really a eerie but cool sight to see. As if rocket launches weren’t spectacular enough, sometimes viewers are treated to a special light show when rocket trails are illuminated by high altitude sunlight. Called twilight phenomena, these giant colorful doodles in the sky leave us wondering… how are these formed??
These twilight phenomena or twilight effects occur when the unburned fuel particles in the rocket trail and water condense, freeze and then expand in the thinner upper atmosphere. Because rocket trails extend really high into the stratosphere and mesosphere, they can catch high altitude sunlight long after the sun has set. The small exhaust particles diffract sunlight and produce pink, blue, green and orange colors, making the twilight phenomenon all the more spectacular.
Yesterday, Nov. 18th, something exploded in the sky above the western United States. Witnesses in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and Idaho say the fireball “turned night into day” and issued shock waves that “shook the ground” when it exploded just after midnight Mountain Standard Time. The fireball was so bright it actually turned the sky noontime blue. Although the fireball appeared during the Leonid Meteor Shower (we could not enjoy that… thanks to the cloud cover), it was not a Leonid. Infrasound recordings of the blast suggest a small asteroid hitting Earth’s atmosphere and exploding with the energy of 0.5 to 1 kiloton of TNT. WOW!!
If you live in the Arctic/Polar Circle then that is what you are experiencing right now…sun rising in the south and setting in the south only an hour later. Sky watchers around the Arctic Circle enter the long polar night when the sun doesn’t rise at all. How long this period lasts depends on your latitude. In northern Norway, the sun won’t be back until the end of January 2010.
The opposite of Polar Twilight is Midnight Sun. The midnight sun
Here are some funky looking clouds, that are not seen very often here in Illinois. But if you have lived near mountains, then you have probably seen these before. Enjoy
They form from stable moist air that flows over a mountain or a range of mountain. If the temperature at the crest of the wave drops to or below the dew point, moisture in the air may condense to form lenticular clouds. As the moist air moves back down, the cloud may evaporate back into vapor. The clouds have been mistaken for UFOs because these clouds have a characteristic lens appearance and smooth saucer-like shape. 
NASA fueled space shuttle Atlantis this morning (Monday) for an afternoon liftoff to the space station, despite the cloudy skies. Local forecasters gave the thumbs up for acceptable weather.
Overnight snow squalls have marked the arrival of a winter storm in Colorado. Bands of heavy snow that fell late Saturday blanketed parts of the Front Range in a very short span. Up to a foot of snow fell in the foothills and suburbs west of Denver with amounts ranging from 4 to 8 inches across the rest of the metro area and onto the eastern plains.
