More on the 1-29-08 Tornado

Here's an interesting clip I found on YouTube. Some strong winds were moving over the WFIE television station in Evansville causing a dangerous situation to those inside the studio. You can actually here the building shaking as the winds move overhead. I went to the WFIE website and found an extended version of the video below. On the extended version, the forecaster comes back on and explains that the station had been struck by lightning which threw all of their computers into chaos. Watch below.

Winter Storm Warning

The winter storm warnings have been pushed a bit further south than they were earlier in the day. Watching the track of the low, it has been moving east for most of the day and may continue to move even further east before beginning a turn to the northeast. If the low does not begin turning soon, then we may end up with a lot more snow than previously predicted. I'm not going to get too excited about it though. Either way, we'll have some interesting winter weather to watch. You can see from the map what the Indianapolis NWS believes we'll get out of this storm. All of those snow totals have the potential to shift souteast if the low does not begin to track to the northeast soon.

Winter Storm Watch

A winter storm watch has been posted for the area in advance of a large storm coming together in the four corners region of the Southwest. Currently, the heaviest snow is forecast to fall to the northwest of Indianapolis with up to 12" possible. In our area I've seen forecasts for 1-2 inches all the way up to 6 or more inches. Since the storm has yet to even develop, I believe forecasters are having a hard time laying down anything more than a generalized track for the storm based on model output. I heard one forecaster from Cincinnati say that his confidence in the current storm track was low. If the track of the storm shifts to the east, our area will receive more snow. Let's hope for an eastward shift.

January Cold and Tornadoes

We've been fairly cold since my last post on January 19. However, there have been a few surprises in there. The coldest morning so far this winter season was -4F on the morning of the 25th. After that, the temperatures began to moderate and then warm signifcantly ahead of an arctic cold front that blasted through on the evening of the 29th. The arctic front was incredibly strong with a squall line of storms marching across the state from north to south. The squall line produced two tornadoes in the state and widespread damage. What I found most incredible about the passage of the front, was the dramatic drop in temperature over a short period of time. If you go back and look at the data for January 2008, you'll see that on the 29th, the high for the day was 54 at 8:20pm and by midnight, the temperature had dropped to 17! That is a 37 degree drop in temperature in just 3 hours 40 minutes! Once the front passed, the winds began to howl. The peak wind gust here at home was 50mph with several gusts over 40mph. I normally keep the high wind speed alarm on my weather station set to 30mph, but it was sounding constantly. So I set the alarm for 40mph and it still sounded every 2-3 minutes. I don't remember sustained winds like that in many years. The peak gust of 50mph didn't set a record for me though. The highest wind I've recorded was 51mph from the NNW on April 4, 2003.

The squall line did produce some tornadoes and straight line wind damage. Here are a couple of pictures. You can find many more pictures of the damage and a newscast video in the storm photo section of my website at http://www.franklincountyweather.info/stormphotos

January Cold Snap

It's cold outside, but not as cold as I thought it would be. The high today reached 15F after a morning low of 9F. The current temperature though is 8F, so I'm sure the low for the day will be a few degrees colder. The lowest wind chill for the day was only -5F. Like I said, it is cold, but not as cold as I was hoping. On this day in 1994, the low temperature was -36F in New Whiteland (which is just south of Greenwood) and -28 in Rushville. We had about 10 inches of snow on the ground too which helped chill the air. My records only go back to 1997, but I remember the 1994 cold snap and believe the low was around -30 here at home.

And Now We Continue With Our Regularly Schedulded January...

After highs in the mid 60's and spring like rain, January plans to make a return to Indiana this weekend. We've had a couple of mornings of *very* light snow causing slick roads, but nothing of much consequence. This weekend is supposed to be very cold with high temperatures in the mid teens and lows around -5. The last cold snap was in February 2007 when the high only hit 9.3 on the 5th. Let's hope we can do better than that!! :-)

Is it April or January??

Here we are in the first week of January, but MotherNature must think it is April. Temperatures today warmed to 59 today and remains there now at 9:30pm. The warmth should gain even more strength tomorrow when temperatures are expected to rise to the mid 60's. I would not imagine it to be out of the realm of possibility that Louisville, KY hits 70 degrees tomorrow afternoon, especially if a bit of sunshine gets through. We'll see.

There are indications that a large winter storm will be organizing next weekend. Some forecasters believe this could bring our area some large snowfall totals. The storm is a very long way off though and I'm sure there will be a number of changes before it materializes.

Arctic Blast

The weather has been very quiet over the past two weeks, hence the lack of posts. Christmas day was very mild with a high temperature of 44 and clear blue skies. It was a very nice day. Things have turned around a bit this week with snow and cold temperatures. We've only gotten 2-3 inches of very dry fluffy snow, but the arctic air is in place for today with this morning's low dropping to 4 degrees and the afternoon high so far reaching only 10 degrees. This is the coldest we've been so far this winter. If we weren't in Indiana, it would be hard to believe that just last week the temperatures were in the 40's and 50's. The cold won't last though as forecasters are saying that we will be near 60 degrees this coming weekend with rain.