TomTaylor's WunderBlog

Large-Scale Atmospheric Equatorial Waves

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 22:24:00 GMT

AussieStorm had a question last night about equatorial rossby waves and I realized that atmospheric equatorial waves are something almost none of us pay attention to on the blog. In fact, I'd be willing to bet most of us on the blog have no idea what an equatorial rossby wave is. Realizing this, I thought it was a good opportunity to write a blog...

Atmospheric equatorial kelvin waves, rossby waves, and mixed gravity-rossby waves are an import...
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Model Verification for Sub-Tropical Rain Event over SoCal

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 19:40:00 GMT

For those unaware, a cut-off low has made the last few days pretty wet across most of Southern California. While this is certainly not an extreme or particularly unusual rain event, it has been significant for how severely the models failed at predicting the rainfall over the region. Models typically have a tough time with cut-off low events, but here we will see just how poorly they performed a 24hr forecast.

Overview of the Event

A low ...
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2012 Model Performance (GFS vs Euro) and Current Tropical Analysis

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 07:29:00 GMT

2012 Model Performance; Analyzing the Big BattlesWhen tracking tropical cyclones, we usually see only minor disagreements in track among the models. Our two most reliable global models, the GFS and ECMWF, also tend to be in good agreement on track, as we would expect being the two most accurate models. However, track differences in a couple hundreds of miles out to five days are not uncommon between the two. This year, however, we have seen two massive disagreements...
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Tropical Cyclone Monica's Maximum Intensity

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 02:23:00 GMT

While we have all been admiring the impressive intensity that Super Typhoon Sanba has achieved, I wanted to take a moment and comment on Tropical Cyclone Monica of 2006. With the lack of any instruments actually inside of the eye of Sanba, forecasters, and amateurs such as me, have been forced to rely on Dvorak satellite estimates to determine the intensity of the storm. In discussing the biases these estimates tend to have, a paper concerning Tropical Cyclone Monic...
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Hurricane Irene

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 07:33:00 GMT

Irene is looking much better (...or worse for the US) tonightWater VaporInfraredInfrared-Water VaporAnalysisCloud tops are very cold (-80c to -90c zone) over the core which indicates deep convection and overshooting tops (signaled by the negative IR-WV values) favor further strengthening of the core. Outflow to the west has dramatically improved as well as seen by the streaking upper level clouds shooting out westward on the west side of the storm. Upper convergence...
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