Saturday, September 22, 2007

Last Day Of Summer Is Tale Of Two Seasons

Depending on where you are located this weekend, the last day of summer is bringing everything from snow to tornadoes.

A large area of low pressure spinning near southern California will keep the west cool and damp this weekend.

What is a cut-off area of low pressure? It is a low pressure that is not in the main flow of jet stream winds in the upper atmosphere. Cut-off low pressure areas will sit and spin until they either dissipate or eventually drift close enough to the jet stream flow that they get picked up and moved off.

Sometimes a cut-off low pressure can be bad, such as earlier in the summer when a cut-off low pressure kept Texas and Oklahoma very wet for several weeks.

In this case it is GREAT news for the Los Angeles area, which saw the first rainfall in 6 months and the heaveist September rain in 2 decades!

The rain caused some flash flooding across the large burn scars from summer fires in the vicinity.

Meanwhile the eastern states will end summer on a very warm note, so get out and enjoy because it is the time of year when things could change quickly.

And tropical depression #10 moved onshore near Ft. Walton Beach, Florida Friday. It wasn't the wind and rain maker many feared, but there were several tornadoes reported with the storm system.

One twister caused significant damage outside of Orlando.

And did you by chance see a radar of the upper midwest on Friday? A long line of severe thunderstorms (also known as a squall line) stretched from Iowa to the upper peninsula of Michigan at one point. The storms brought rain, wind and hail to the area. Much of Wisconsin was under a tornado watch at one point on Friday.

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