Good morning bloggers,
Did you see or experience the sunset last night? I have posted a couple of pictures below that I took after the sunset.
There are two major parts to the LRC. One is the "long term" longwaves. The other is the cycle. The summer forecast, that we issued in May, had nothing to do with the cycle. It had everything to do with the position of the "long term" longwave troughs and ridges. We made a great forecast based on our knowledge of this. Remember, there has been a "long term" longwave trough east of Kansas City. It was strgon enough that we had confidence to forecast the highly unlikely development of an upper high inside this trough. Well, summer is almost over, and an upper high never formed northeast of Kansas City this summer. And, we will end up near average on rainfall for the summer months, and a bit below average on temperatures. August should have had 2 to 3 inches of rain, and even though some spots had over 3 inches of rain this month, overall it has been rather dry in most spots. The forecast for a cooler/wetter summer really did come through. We will be talking a lot more about the LRC as the new weather pattern develps this fall.
Apparantly (Ellen and EJ just talked about it on News radio 980 KMBZ), the Farmers Almanac is predicting a colder than average winter with above average snowfall. I hope it's right! But, you know what I believe. The weather pattern doesn't even set up until October, at the earliest, so any prediction for the winter that comes out before November is based on something that I don't know about, and these forecast have been shown to be the least accurate long range forecasts. The Farmers Almanac issues their forecasts a year in advance.
I took the above picture about 15 minutes after sunset last night. The sky had a rare grey/blue tint to it with some altocumulus clouds below (10,000 feet up), and some very think cirrus or cirrostratus clouds above creating the interesting color combination. The dry August air mass also contributed to the ideal conditions for this look to the sky Sunday evening.
I tried to get Breezy and Stormy to pose for a picture. Just a few minutes after the above picture was taken an orange glow appeared and I snapped this picture of Stormy (left) and Breezy (right).
The Olympics are over, so NBC Action News is back on at 11 AM, our Midday newscast. And, our 10 PM newscast returns tonight as our schedules will be getting back to normal. We will be tracking the changing weather pattern and our next chance of rain. There is no chance of rain today! High pressure is again in control. The record low tonight is 53 degrees. We could make a run at it. Freeze warnings are in effect for northern Minnesota this morning, in August! Have a great start to the week.
Gary