Amir Mohsen
متخصص بخش هواشناسی
Severe Weather Season And What You need to Know
Now that winter has taken a backseat and is slowly transitioning to Spring within the next couple of weeks, we are going to brief you on the basics of severe weather. We will give mention to topics and terms used in this educational update throughout the times when severe weather is possible and the common case of Spring fever and it’s severe weather setups across the country.
Figure 1: We find towards the transition from Winter to Spring that lingering cold air adds as an ingredient to newly accompanied warmer air to produce spawning severe weather where colliding air masses meet. This is common over the Midwest, Deep South, Southeast, and Mid-Atlantic. This of which we will illustrate throughout the post.
In this figure and applied to also figures (2,3) the red signifies our warmer sector(s) while blue indicating our colder sector. Between in the pink sits the jet stream thus our frontal position and setup. One of first common setups this earlier Spring exists in the following figure and ripe for tornadoes from the Southern Plains, Deep South, and Tennessee Valley shown in figure 1. The trough is not as deeply dug but the equaling constant of both air masses makes of these impressive and large outbreaks.In a synopsis form we would best describe this as ”having a cold air mass located to the north and a warmer air mass that is attempting to invade the region via transport from the low pressure system and its associated warm front. As the two air masses clash, their convergence results in an explosion of convection, thus producing thunderstorms. In general, the bigger differential the two air masses are in temperature, the stronger the thunderstorms are. The low pressure then moves Northeast towards the Great Lakes or into the Northeast, dragging its thunderstorms across the Eastern half of the country. “
Deep South Threats
Figure 2: Another setup shown in this figure comes from a deeper dug trough out of the West which pushes into warmer air squeezing and disturbing the atmosphere while creating that same constant mixing of warmer and colder air. We also especially in this region mention the juicier atmosphere because of the water bodies of the Gulf and Southeast coast which contribute to developing storms. Normally in this general setup we find linear storm producing tornadoes but most likely strong wind damage and heavy flash flooding.
Mid-Atlantic & Northeast Threats
Figure 3: Here another previewing stormy setup though this time over the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. This is very common during all parts of the season as we like to call it the normal frontal setup where a heaving cold front from the West hooks up with a warmer and moist air mass from the South and East to develop strong storms ahead of the front. This common for linear storms and some super celled.
Know The Lingo The thermodynamic parameters that will be explained and defined are the following in this section. They are all very important to the development of convective systems. If you take the time to read and educate yourself, you will be much more prepared to comprehend our updates, not to mention actually knowing what reasoning we use when forecasting a severe weather setup. There are a few definitions and terms that we must go over, to make the update easier to understand.
(Please be advised that this is a conceptual outlook on the basic ingredients of severe weather, and that more parameters aid in defining the severe weather threat and intensity).
