Skip to main content

Another reason why Atlanta weather forecasts are inaccurate

This was in a long-gone 2005 blog by Jon Richards but it's still relevant:

He explains why it didn't get as warm as it was supposed to earlier this week, and why it's so cold today

Forecasts Get It Wrong Three Days In a Row

For the last three days, the predicted high temperatures in metro Atlanta haven’t been what they were forecast to be. As detailed here, Monday’s miss was caused by a slow moving warm front. On Tuesday, we were supposed to reach a high of 70 degrees, before retreating to a low in the lower sixties today. Instead, we had a high of 60 Tuesday, and broke 70 degrees for the first time this year on Wednesday.

Tuesday’s colder than expected temperatures were caused by a combination of heavy fog in the morning and a mini wedge, where the colder air closer to the ground was overrun by the warmer air approaching from the southwest.

Overnight Monday, the skies cleared, and due to Monday’s rain, fog developed close to the ground. As the warmer air approached Tuesday morning, it slid on top of the colder air near the surface, forming cloud cover and more fog that prevented the sun’s heat from warming us to the expected temperature.

On Wednesday, the high recorded at my weather station of just over 70 degrees occurred because a cold front approaching from the northwest took longer to arrive than predicted. The forecast called for a chance of rain midday as the pressure difference between the moist air already present and the drier air that was approaching with the front would cause precipitation.

Instead, the front didn’t get to Atlanta until late in the afternoon. Throughout the day, periods of sun warmed us up, and by the time the front arrived late in the afternoon, there wasn’t enough energy to cause storms, except in a few isolated areas in North Georgia.

The cold front does mean business though, as temperatures have dropped by about 15 degrees in the last few hours. Look for slightly cooler than normal temperatures over the next few days until the next front passes over the weekend

 I'm trying to understand how weather systems work but it's hard!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Yale Shakespeare

I've had this set of Shakespeare volumes since the late 1980's. Super-portable at 7" by 4.5" with nice, readable font size. Well footnoted for vocabulary and extensive note apparatus at the end of each volume. I'm surprised there's not much more on this set than various auctions and used book listings — looks like they still fetch $80 for all 40 books. Mine is a printing from 1954 edited by Tucker Brooke I found this review of the series from when it first came out. Very critical, but wanted to capture it, since this has been my reference edition for over 30 years  
Post a Comment
Read more

The New Jersey part of the Queen of Hearts passes

This was a really fun group of songwriters that used to frequent the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville. I first saw The Queen of Hearts at the late-lamented Swallow In The Hollow in Roswell. If you never got a chance to go, imagine a big rustic mountain cabin with pretty damn good BBQ and live music every night. Everybody in the band wrote songs and they would rotate who would lead and everybody else sang great harmony. BethAnne Clayton was the one from New Jersey and she passed 14 January 2020 at 54. Sounds like the rest of the band were able to gather around her in the hospital for a last round of singing together. I can only imagine the emotion that day. Here's how I found out about it: https://www.ellenbritton.com/blog/2020/2/14/in-memory-of-bethanne-clayton The band got together in 1999 and it doesn't look like much of anything made it into the new world of streaming but the two albums I have are: Queen of Hearts (2002) with stand-out songs "Treat Me Right" and "He...
Post a Comment
Read more